


Boku no Hero Splatademia - A MiriTama Tale

by the_sylph_of_mind



Category: Splatoon, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Jock Straps, M/M, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Sea Monsters, Size Difference, Tentacle Dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2020-10-29 10:28:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20795168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_sylph_of_mind/pseuds/the_sylph_of_mind
Summary: Eight, a little navy Octoling with no memory and a seemingly skittish disposition, finds himself leagues underground on a Metro frequented by Denizens of the Deep. Tasked with putting together a mysterious door to the surface and hoping to find the key to remembering who he is somewhere along the way, he's on a journey along the Deepsea Metro that yanks him out of his own dimension at every station and requires him to pass tests and solve puzzles. It's already a lot to bear, but when his personal quests get tangled up with a Sea Angel named Mirio—translucent, cheery, and nearly two feet taller than Eight—he finds that the path to his goals isn't so straightforward anymore.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HedgehogOfSpades](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HedgehogOfSpades/gifts).

> The happiest of birthday wishes to Hedgie, a true friend, MiriTama stan, and monster fucker paragon. (Please check out the piece of art she made that inspired this fic on her Instagram at @Hedgehogofspades!)

* * *

The creatures down here on the Deepsea Metro aren’t like anyone he’s ever seen…at least, he thinks they aren't like anyone he’s ever seen. He doesn’t remember what he’s seen, exactly, but the patrons of the train are all distinct from Octolings, at the very least, rotating in a new species every few platforms or so. The only other contemporary in arms he has is Captain Cuttlegum, and he’s an Inkling and a stranger…or an enemy? He’d mentioned that they had been fighting before they’d both found themselves underground and discovered this Metro at the end of an abandoned rail line on the other side of a locked door, but with the Captain’s protégé Agent Three missing in action and no ideas for how to return to the surface either, they’d put aside their differences…that apparently they’d had. 

“Eight?” 

He glances up, realizing the thrum of the train had been lulling him toward getting lost in thought, and he’d drifted away from the conversation he’d been having with the Captain. 

“Sorry, what?”

“I was askin’ if you’d found anything useful in those mem cakes you’ve been findin’,” 

Eight glances down, and he has to tuck behind his ear a navy tentacle that falls into his eyes. 

“…Some. I found a few that made me remember some of the people on the surface, but, everything else is sort of…random stuff. Nothing about who I am, yet,”

“Ya really can’t remember anything, huh,” He can tell that the Captain frowns, but it’s hard to discern the fuller expression behind the high yellow collar. “It’s so deep down here, all the pressure grabs whatever’s floatin’ around and squashes it flat, and I guess that includes lost memories. If there’s a way for you to piece together who you are, I bet it’s in those mem cakes. Just gotta keep knockin’ out those platforms and I bet you’ll dig up your memories in ‘em,”

Eight screws up his mouth, fiddling absentmindedly with the CQ-80 but not opening it to select a station, and flicks his gaze up to ask,

“Remembering my name would be nice…do you think I’ll find it?”

“I think you’ll find all yer memories, Eight,” The Captain grins and it’s a little unsettling just how _wide _his mouth stretches across his face. “You know, there could be some people ridin’ the rails that maybe have answers to some of yer questions. You ain’t the only one who’s tried their hand at passing these trials, if that phone’s tellin’ the truth. Why don’t you ask around?”

Eight feels his stomach drop at the prospect of speaking to any of the strangers on the train, and though it’s a small insight, he feels some excitement that at least his body seemingly remembers something about who he is. 

“I-I…I don’t think I can,” 

“Well who’s to say that, huh? For all you know, you love talkin’ to people!”

“Something tells me that’s not the case, but,” He sighs and stands, flicking open theCQ-80’s map of the Metro lines. “Maybe I’ll try after a few more platforms…”

* * *

The Octolings that Eight goes up against at some of these stations are somehow _wrong,_ and it’s even more distressing that he can ascertain this, but can’t remember why or how he knows it. He can’t even be sure that _they’re_ the ones who are unsettling and abnormal—after all, they have _him_ outnumbered however-many-to-one little blue Octoling, but he supposes he has the twin voices of the idol girls in his ear reassuring him that no, these guys are very atypical. He clutches his ink gun especially tightly, despite knowing it’ll be mysteriously stripped away at the other end of the platform before he gets back on the train. 

He’s been doing this for a while, with only the promise from a telephone that at the end of it, he can leave. Ten thousand and seven previous people had tried, surely _some _had accomplished what had been asked of them and made it back to the surface, but Eight hasn’t found any of the mysterious items he needs to collect to give to that phone…which is a wild sentence. At least, he thinks it’s a wild sentence. It’s been just platform after platform, trial after trial, with mem cake after unhelpful, random-fact mem cake—nothing new that seems like it used to belong in his head. It’s all starting to weigh on him. He’s staring at the readout of the map and watching his cursor idly blink, eyes glassy. 

“Take a break, why dontcha?” 

Eight jumps at the proximity of the unfamiliar voice, nearly dropping his CQ-80 as he whips his head around, only to have the whole of his vision taken up by a red letterman’s jacket buttoned over an expansively broad chest. 

“Whoah, sorry! Didn’t mean to spook ya,” 

Eight’s body seems to have ground to a halt (another insight that he must be the skittish type), and he has to fight to crane his neck back and make eye contact with the person in the stratosphere above him. At first, Eight thinks he must be a ghost, because the person looking down from at least sixteen inches above him is completely translucent. There’s something like a spine in him, in the center—a solid pink mass floating in the bluish, gel-like flesh and almost blooming like a tulip beneath a face ethereally suspended on the surface of his skin, boasting a warm grin and round, dark blue eyes that Eight is positive are meant to see in the dark. 

“Don’t mean to be nosy, it’s just I’ve seen you getting on and off the train a lot using that map, and you looked like you were zoning out for a minute. Are you tired?”

Eight swallows. Looking into this _titan’s _face is proving very taxing, and he manages to shake his head a little.

“No? Well that’s good, at least. I’m Mirio, by the way,” He holds out his ghostly hand for Eight to shake, and he numbly accepts, not even considering that maybe the sensation of his hand being enveloped by Mirio’s at-once firm and gummy one would send the unexpected shock through him that it does. “You’re an Octoling, right?” Mirio gives him a moment to answer, to fill the silence, but Eight can’t bring himself to do anything but leave it cavernously empty. Mirio tilts his head and the light seems to bend as it shines through him. “You don’t talk much, huh?”

Eight glances down. Mirio’s still clasping his hand even though the shake itself had concluded, and summoning speech is suddenly a monstrous effort.

“I’m an Octoling,” He manages, staring at the way he can see his fingers through Mirio’s, bluish and just a little warped. Mirio beams. 

“I thought so!I’ve seen a few of you down here, you all look a little lost,” He pauses for a moment. “I see you sorta lookin’, there. You don’t have many Sea Angels up on the surface, huh?”

“U-Um,” Eight freezes, caught staring and not sure whether or not to pull his hand away…and he doesn’t even have an answer to the question. “I…I don’t…remember,” He glances up (way up) to meet Mirio’s quizzical gaze, and blessedly he loosens his pliable grip and lets Eight slip his hand out. “I…I don’t _think _I’ve seen a…a Sea Angel before, but,” He rubs at his neck and drops his gaze to his shoes. “…But, I think I fell…I-I’m having some trouble remembering…everything,” 

Understanding lights Mirio’s expression. 

“Ohh. Wow, that’s rough. Is that why you didn’t tell me your name? You can’t remember?” 

Eight chews his lip and shakes his head.

“…I’m going by Eight, right now,” 

Mirio grins. 

“Great pun, I like it! Nice to meet you, Eight!” Over the tinny speakers, CQ Cumber’s voice announces the impending stop, and Mirio exhales and stands straighter—adding an inch to his mountainous height. “This is my stop. You still on your grind? If you need a break, Deepsea U has a great café I could show you,” 

Eight’s brow creases as the train slows at one of the normal, physical platforms he can’t access. From what he can tell, the Metro stops at all the same stations on the same map as the one on his CQ-80, but whenever he leaves the train, where he ends up is in some displaced test chamber in an overlapping dimension. Not, like, a campus train station or wherever Mirio’s heading, he thinks as he glances at the patch on his letterman’s jacket. When the other passengers disembark, they all seem confident they won’t be yanked from this plane of existence and deposited in rat mazes or mirror-world versions of turf war fields. His skin feels clammy the more he thinks about it. 

“…I can’t leave until I’ve taken care of something,” Is what he settles on, glancing down, not wanting to get into the details, especially right as Mirio needs to go.

“Ah, well, if you’re still at it later, I’ll probably bump into you on my ride back,” Mirio’s grin is stunningly bright as the train doors slide open behind him. “Good luck, Eight!” 

“Yeah…” 

Mirio turns and steps from the train, leaving Eight with his heart in his mouth as the doors close and the Metro resumes its trek. 

* * *

The first of the _thangs _(which makes Eight grimace every time he has to hear it) is a black, boxy thing with dials on the front, and the telephone assures him that with three more pieces, the door to the promised land will open. Eight’s stomach doesn’t feel right. He tries to clarify once or twice that this “promised land” the phone is talking about is the surface, but the near-unintelligible slang dialect it’s chosen to use combined with various errors and redactions in its sentences frustrate Eight enough to just drop it and get back on the Metro. At least he has a goal he can follow, and maybe clarity will come later in the journey. About all of this, about the promised land, the Metro, the telephone, his memories…

“Hey, you’re still here!” Eight jumps again, despite the voice having a precedent, and turns to meet Mirio’s towering gaze. 

“…Yeah, still here,” His eyes drop to his hands as he fiddles with the CQ-80.

“How’s the grind? Did you take care of that stuff?”

“Well…the first part of it, I guess,” He says, thinking about the first thang (ugh) he’d left with the telephone. 

“Hey, good stuff!” Mirio’s grin is so genuine it nearly shines, or maybe it’s just the juxtaposition of white teeth against translucent flesh in an eerily suspended face with no bone or sinew to speak of connecting all the components of it. It’s ethereal and fascinating, and Eight seems to have a hard enough time as it is speaking to people, but especially to Mirio, most of what he can summon in conversation with him halting and spoken to his hands. 

“How much longer ya think you’ll be at it until you’re done?” He continues. Eight chews his lip. 

“It’s hard to say…I guess I’ll be done when I remember everything,”

“Oh yeah, well, you’ve found one memory, right?” 

Eight’s brow creases, then he shakes his head a little, seeing where he’ll need to explain if Mirio presses any further. 

“No, no, I guess I’m sort of on two different missions. The memories are…like a personal quest. And I haven’t found any mem cakes that seem to belong to me yet,” 

“Aw, bummer,” Mirio tilts his head, then brightens, shoving his ghostly hand into the pocket of his jacket and withdrawing a fistful of something that Eight can vaguely see through the back of his hand. “Hey, do any of these look familiar?” He turns his palm over and opens it, revealing a small pile of mem cakes. Eight’s eyes widen.

“I…I thought these were only at Metro stations…where did _you _find them?”

“Just around, you know. Floatin’.” Mirio cups his hands together and offers the mem cakes to Eight like he’s holding water for him to drink from his hands before it drips away, much like memories. “So? Anything?”

Eight swallows and cautiously lifts a hand to sort through the six or seven shapes sitting in Mirio’s palms. As he does, he hears the CQ-80 in his pocket blip every time he examines a new one, recording what his mind can’t quite take in just yet. 

“I guess I do see them the most around the Metro stations, now that I think about it,” Mirio muses as Eight continues to carefully sift through the mem cakes. “Maybe it’s cuz the people who need them the most are already searching for them, and since the Metro is really the only way to get around down here, maybe these little guys somehow know that they’ll be found if they’re close to the stations,” 

Eight’s heart flutters, a little taken aback by the romance of Mirio’s sentiment. 

“Why…why are _you _collecting them?” 

“They just seem lonely, I guess. Lost. Sorta like you,” Eight glances up, meeting Mirio’s otherworldly expression written with nothing but gentle sincerity. “I’ve never found any memories that seem like they belong to someone, but maybe today’s my lucky day and I found some of yours!”

“Y-Yeah, maybe,” Eight shakes himself away from the eye contact and opens up the display on his CQ-80, navigating to the mem cake log and reading through the new entries’ descriptions. He’s not entirely sure _why_ what happens when he reads one of these happens. Most of them don’t trigger any kind of response, but when he found the mem cakes for the idol girls who comprise Off The Hook, it was like a door had opened in his mind and he could all at once recall everything about them after he’d read the short rhyme that he _guesses _his CQ-80 generates as a kind of translation. If he didn’t have the CQ-80, he doesn’t know how he would take in the memories…Though, Mirio _had _mentioned that he could decipher their contents. He swallows and glances up from his display. 

“Hey, Mirio,”

“Yeah?” Mirio’s eyes sparkle and Eight feels a flush gather in the tips of his ears. 

“How…how do _you_ know what’s in these? Like, what memories they are?” 

“From how they’re shaped,”

“But, is it like…like you’re missing something, and then you’ve found it? Like, up here?” He taps his temple, not sure how else to describe it. 

“No, nothing like that. Sorry to disappoint. Maybe that’s only something that happens when it’s _your_ memory that used to live up there. I’d know if I lost anything that needed retrieving, so that might be why all the mem cakes I’ve found don’t do that thing to me that you’re describing,” He grins. “And I don’t have a whole lot to go missing in the first place,” 

“Well, don’t be mean to yourself,” Eight grins a little, and he’s struck for a moment by a feeling he can’t quite identify, but Mirio is quick to help him out. 

“Hey, you’ve got a nice smile, Eight!” 

Oh…That’s what it is: this is the first time he’s smiled since waking up in that weird derelict train station…This is the first time he can literally remember smiling at all. He blushes, feeling a little dizzy, a little overwhelmed as he glances up to Mirio.

“I…do?”

“Yeah! Is that something you forgot, too?”

“I…guess so,”

“Well hey, there’s our first success! Anything else—anything in the mem cakes?” 

“O-Oh,” Eight flicks his gaze quickly back to the quite forgotten display, heart pounding. “I, uh, let’s see…” He scrolls through the remaining unexamined entries, but none feel like a floodgate lifting, revealing in a rush information about his past that had been locked away. He shakes his head and pockets the CQ-80 with a tremble in his hands unrelated to the lack of success. 

“Aw, dang,” The disappointment is clear in Mirio’s voice, and Eight is sure his expression mirrors it, but he can’t bring himself to look away from his hands and meet Mirio’s eyes. “Hey, Eight,” He feels a hand on his back, and nearly the width of it, and the unexpected contact makes him jump and jerk his gaze from his hands to Mirio’s face, full of a concerned earnestness. “You’ll figure it out, don’t worry,”

Eyes wide, Eight concludes through the stutter in his thoughts that Mirio is interpreting his shaking hands and downcast face as distress over his hopes of regaining his memories being dashed again. Of course he does feel _that,_ but there’s a much more predominant and confusing set of feelings curling open inside him like a bloom waking that’s got his body nervous and dizzy. Mirio’s round, dark eyes are glittery in a way that Eight’s sure he’s never seen before, even with his memory loss, and he watches as they only light further with a burst of reassurance as he says, 

“Well, hey, I’ll just keep an eye out and bring you any mem cakes I find! I’m on the train often enough, so between the two of us, I’m sure we’ll find your memories way faster!”

Eight feels his heart skip, and it’s all he can do to ask,

“You’d do that?”

“Sure! I’m the sorta type to butt in whenever someone needs help,” Incongruous with the darkness the train rattles through, his grin is bright like the sun, like he’s a light to move toward, like he’s a beacon. Eight feels his eyes shine as the train begins to slow under them. “I gotta jet, but you’ll be here, right?” 

“Yeah…” Is all he can manage through the feeling flooding his stomach and crowding his lungs and throat. 

“Rad, I’ll catch you later, then, Eight!” 

“Yeah…” 

He lifts his hand in a daze as Mirio saunters through the train doors and disappears into the dark. 

* * *

The second thang makes Eight’s stomach twist uncomfortably. 

“I thought we were building a door,” He tries to ask the telephone, but all it replies with is the same garbled message that if Eight gathers all four thangs, the door to the promised land will open. He scowls, part nerves, part helplessness, part frustration, and stalks back toward the Captain near the train doors. 

“Anythin’?” 

“More of the same,”

“Well, nothin’ to be done about it. At least we have a goal to work towards, let’s get back to it.”

“Yeah,”

Cuttlegum frowns, giving the platform one last long look before sighing and turning to walk back onto the Metro. 

“Still haven’t got hide nor hair from Three,” 

Eight’s brow peaks. 

“We’ll find him. Or maybe he’ll find us,” 

“Awful optimistic of ya, Eight! It’s a good look on ya,”

Eight smirks.

“You think so?”

“Yeah, who’d ya pick it up from?”

Eight’s heart clatters in his chest. 

“…Just, trying to keep my chin up, you know?” 


	2. Chapter 2

The trials are getting harder. The first time he loses an 8-ball to the void below one of the maps, he feels like he’s torn apart and then reassembled at the last checkpoint. He’d been left feeling dizzy and nauseous, but the test kept going, so he’d had to, as well. He finds himself wanting to just stay on the Metro, despite knowing that the longer he does, the longer it’ll be before he finds the remaining thangs and he can go back to the surface, but at least on the train he’s not being tested or teleported or anything…plus, there’s someone whose company Eight’s starting to look forward to, and their paths can only cross on the Metro. 

“I didn’t spot any mem cakes today, sorry to say,” Mirio says as he takes a seat in an empty stretch of the train car, tilting his head as he seems to get a closer look at Eight. “You look…really tired, Eight. You sure you don’t wanna come with me somewhere and cool your heels for a bit?” 

Eight feels his face fall as he rubs at his eyes. 

“I can’t. It’s complicated, and I don’t understand everything about it, but if I leave the train with you, I won’t go where you’re going. The stations are different for me, somehow. It was explained to me, something about like…Kamabo Corp and how the magnetism that’s this deep underground makes the Metro like an inter-dimensional hub for ‘applicants’—meaning me…It didn’t make much sense, to be honest, but it’s not like _I’ve_ got a better explanation, so…” 

He trails off into a shrug. Mirio’s brows scrunch.

“Yeah, that does sound complicated,” He looks Eight up and down, and even sitting, he’s only just short enough to be at Eight’s eye level. “Are you sleeping, like, at all?” 

“Not a whole lot,” He admits. “The train’s not the easiest place to get a solid six-to-eight hours in,”

“You need somewhere comfy?” 

Eight gives a wry chuckle and looks at his hands.

“Probably. Not sure I remember exactly how I like to sleep, but I can guess that ‘public transit seating’ isn’t the sleep number setting that knocks me out,” 

He hears a flurry of snaps being pulled open, and Eight glances up to see Mirio removing his letterman’s jacket, revealing a baseball tee underneath with a logo on it in a language Eight can’t read, but it looks like it could be a string of numbers. Mirio’s arms are the same empty, translucent kind of flesh as the rest of him, easily as big around as Eight’s ribcage. 

“I’ll hang out,” He says, patting the seat next to him and offering his jacket toward Eight with his other hand. Eight’s brow peaks, afraid to believe the conclusion he’s drawing. 

“I…what?”

“I’m soft,” Mirio grins, and the blush that gathers in his cheeks is an otherworldly, bloodless sort of hazy blue. “Well, sorta soft. Softer than the train benches you’ve been sleeping on, at least. You know flan? Sea Angels’ve been compared to that, hah,”

“Who…who’s comparing you to flan?” Eight says in a flustered daze. 

“Probably you in a minute, here,” Mirio tilts his head, smile listing toward bashful as he lifts an arm up onto the back of the train bench, offering up his side. “Come on,”

Eight swallows as he looks over the space between Mirio’s arm and chest that he’s inviting Eight to fill, and the thing in his insides that’s been looking forward to Mirio’s train rides and taking up the space in him that his lungs need to breathe suddenly rears back and spears him like a skewer. With unsteady hands, he reaches out and takes Mirio’s jacket, draping it over his shoulders where it sits almost like a cloak on him, hem nearly reaching his knees. He crosses the pace or two between them and, after only half a breath more of hesitation, sinks onto the bench next to Mirio, shoulder tucked against Mirio’s broad side and legs drawn up under him. Mirio closes his arm around Eight, draping it across his chest as he cautiously rests his temple against Mirio’s collarbone…or, where it would be, if he had them. 

Mirio’s not exactly warm, but he _is _soft in a springy sort of way, and he’s so much broader than Eight that he’s able to settle into Mirio’s side like he would a pile of pillows. There’s a scent to his skin that’s wholly new and unidentifiable, but crisp and pleasant.

“…Yeah, sorta like flan,” He grins nervously, but being nearly cradled like he is makes him suddenly realize just how _tired _he actually feels, all the stress and fear and uncertainty that he’s had no other choice but to bear all at once slamming into him and making his next exhale long and deep, body wilting against Mirio’s in a grateful surrender to the exhaustion, and he feels himself drifting to sleep almost immediately.

* * *

When Eight wakes up, he finds that he’d turned around under Mirio’s arm at some point. His knees are tucked to his chin and braced against the back of the bench, and he’s clutching Mirio’s arm like a stuffed animal against the whole length of his torso, his face cushioned against where Mirio’s shoulder meets his chest. He tilts his head back and sees that Mirio had fallen asleep at some point too, resting his chin in his palm. 

His eyes are closed, but like the rest of his flesh, his lids are translucent, and it creates an uncanny sense of watchfulness despite his heavy, gentle breathing. Oh, he’s breathing…with _what? _Are there lungs to be found under that baseball tee, despite his body seeming to be near-empty and bizarrely simplistic? Mirio’s composition continues to bewilder and fascinate Eight, and he finds himself staring for a long moment before he realizes he has no clue how much time has passed and he’s positive Mirio has long missed his stop. He feels a sudden burst of kinetic anxiety, but when he tries to dislodge himself from under Mirio’s arm, he discovers that Mirio’s ghostly body is surprisingly dense, because he’s very much pinned next to him under the weight of his arm.

“U-Um, hey, Mirio,” He unwinds one of his arms from around Mirio’s bicep and tentatively pats at his shoulder. “Mirio, I think you missed your stop, wake up,” 

Mirio’s expression doesn’t approach wakefulness, but he does twitch a little and murmurs something unintelligible, and Eight’s heart throbs at how endearing it is. He swallows and cautiously continues,

“Mirio? You’re also sort of pinning m—!” 

In a rush of movement, he’s handily scooped into Mirio’s lap as he shifts in his sleep, turning to his other side and pulling Eight along with him. When Mirio settles again, Eight’s legs are draped across Mirio’s, and he’s now snugly wrapped in _both_ his arms, and what’s more, Mirio’s forehead has found its way to the point of Eight’s shoulder. The gel-like flesh transitions to a different texture where his hair reads, nearly like so many yellowed tendrils—Eight can tell because his cheek is buried in them at the crown of Mirio’s head. 

His heart thunders in his chest. From across the way, he spots the Captain making his way through the doors between train cars, doubtlessly realizing it’s been a while since he’d seen Eight and wanting to check the other cars for him, then maybe follow up with CQ Cumber to ask if he’s presently trying to pass a trial. When he catches the Captain’s eyes, there’s several inscrutable expressions that flash over his face. 

Eight, mortified, mouths “It’s not what you think,” 

The Captain snickers, loud enough for Eight to hear all the way across the train car, and he gives an odd sort of sign, a thumbs up paired with a shrug, as if to ask, “Are you good?”

Eight glances at the translucent trap he’s in, and after a moment, gives the Captain a hesitant, wide-eyed grin, nods, and shrugs back to the best of his ability. After a chuckle and a replying nod, the Captain retreats back to the previous train car, seemingly content to leave Eight to it…whatever _it_ is. 

“M-Mirio, hey, come on,” He ventures again. Lucky to have one arm spared from the snare of Mirio’s inescapable cuddle, he reaches again to try and gently rouse him, if for no other reason than he’s sure his whole body will go numb under the weight of him. Eight’s efforts seem wasted on Mirio’s arm and shoulder, and it occurs to him that he can’t know how much Mirio actually, like, _feels_ with the body he’s got_. _He screws up his mouth and it catches some of Mirio’s odd, gummy strands of hair, and as he brushes them out of his mouth and smoothes them back into place along Mirio’s crown, his hand ends up lingering on Mirio’s cheek. 

This seems to do the trick. 

Mirio inhales deeply and rubs his forehead into Eight’s shoulder before lifting his head and opening his eyes to meet Eight’s absolutely terrified ones. In another burst of embarrassed horror he realizes his hand is still pressed to Mirio’s cheek and he can’t unfreeze to pull it away so it just _stays there_ as Mirio blearily gets his bearings a grand total of three inches from Eight’s face. Eight can tell when Mirio finally wholly comes to, because a dusky blush gathers across his nose during a long moment of silence.

“Oh. Huh. How’d this happen?”

“Y-You missed your stop,” He finally yanks his hand back, trying to wave away the situation. “You’re like a really heavy sleeper! I was trying to wake you up, I’m sorry, you sort of…rolled over…and took me with you…”

“Oh man, I did? Sorry about that,” He grins through his blush and disentangles himself from Eight. “Other than that, though, did you sleep good?” 

Eight’s heart is pounding so hard he’s sure his blush is darkening with each pulse, but he still considers Mirio’s question and manages to truthfully reply,

“…Y-Yeah, yeah I did,” 

“Good!” His smile only gets brighter, and as he stands and stretches he casually drops: “So do I need to start staying the night?” 

Mirio gives him a bashful, sidelong grin, and with Eight sitting down, Mirio’s height would be positively frightening, were it not for Eight’s insides insisting that Mirio would be a treat to climb. 

“Wh-What, what?” Eight stumbles over his reaction, both to Mirio’s words _and _the intrusive thought he’d just conjured up, all of it adding to the sum of the blush crawling down his face. 

“I’m kidding, kidding,” Mirio chuckles. “Doesn’t matter how glad I’d be to hang around, I really need to get back. Maybe if we figure out how we can leave the train and go to the same dimension, we can chill properly,” 

Eight’s mind whirls, afraid to clarify anything as the train begins to slow and Mirio checks to see the name of the station along the marquee above the door.

“It’ll be some cardio, but I can probably hoof it back from here,” He glances coyly down at Eight. “You good to knock out more of these trials you need to face after that power nap?”

“U-Um, yeah, I think so,” 

“Good!” The train doors slide open and Mirio gives a translucent thumbs up. “Hold onto my jacket for me?” 

And he’s gone before Eight can protest. 

* * *

The mem cakes at the end of each trial now draw a kind of odd, anxious reaction from Eight’s insides. Where before there was only something to be gained by finding his memories, now there’s also something that could be lost. If he remembers, he’ll be different. He’ll be someone Mirio doesn’t know. He has to fight his way through the stations, half his mind distracting him with sad, nervous tangents. 

When he recovers the third thang, he doesn’t even look at it. 

“Can you take this one to the phone?” He asks the Captain. “I can’t…I can’t handle more of it talking, not right now,” 

Eight sits with his hands clasped as he waits in the train car for the Captain to come back, staring at his shoes. From the pile of his and Cuttlegum’s things at his side, he hears the walkie talkie buzz. 

_“Hey, hey, Eight, I saw you’re really clumsy out there recently, you know! What’s going on with you, huh?” _

Eight winces, but lifts the walkie talkie and responds,

“Just…a little distracted, Nejire,” 

_“Well that’s not good! A distracted Inkling is a dead Inkling, you know! First rule of the battlefield!” _

_ “Nejire, I don’t think that’s a rule of the battlefield,” _A different voice cuts in. _“But, she’s right. If there’s something you need to talk about, there’s little else we’re better suited for in the present situation than listening,” _

Eight sighs, resting his forehead in his hand and resigning himself to the discussion he’s about to have.

“Have either of you ever been in a situation or a place where, like, you can’t stay, but there’s part of you that wants to, even though staying is dumb and illogical and impossible anyway?”

There’s a silence he’s not expecting. 

_“I know what that’s like,” _

_ “You do, Yuyu? What do you mean, huh?” _

_ “It’s not something I want to get into the little details of right now, and especially not when Eight has the floor,” _

Eight chews his lip and guesses the silence that follows is meant for him to fill. 

“What did you end up doing, Yuyu?”

_“I left,” _

“…O-Oh,” Eight frowns, heart aching a little. “I’m not going to lie, I was sort of hoping for a little more explanation,”

_“There’s nothing else to explain. I’d changed as a person, as an Oc—Inkling. Even though there’s parts of me that still miss it to this day, there wasn’t a spot for me to fill as the person I’d become,” _

“We jammin’ about our pasts in here?” The Captain says, returning and sitting heavily down next to Eight.

_“Yeah! And apparently there’s some dark secrets in Yuyu’s past that I don’t know about!” _

_ “Nejire, please,” _There’s a few moments where they seem to be good-naturedly arguing, most of which the walkie-talkie can’t pick up. _“Anyway, Captain, we’ve been keeping our gills to the ground, but we haven’t spotted anything yet about Agent Three,” _

The Captain grimaces. 

“I didn’t think so. He’s smart, he’ll figure it out. I taped a ‘missing’ poster to that telephone to try and widen the net we’re castin’, just in case,”

_“Of course. We’ll keep trying,”_

_ “We’ll keep you posted via our chat logs, you know!”_

“Sounds good, girls. Thanks,”

The Metro begins to move under them again as the idol girls sign off, and the Captain sighs and leans his head back against the window.

“You excited, Eight? Just one more thang to find and we can bounce outta here,” 

“Oh,” Eight takes a long breath before replying with a weak “Yeah,” 

“It’s that Sea Angel, huh?” 

Eight winces and flicks his eyes to the folded jacket next to him. 

“Yeah. CQ Cumber said something about how the people this far underground are…” He sighs and scrubs at his face. “_‘Forbidden access’ _to the promised land. I don’t know why he wouldn’t be able to come to the surface with me other than maybe that Metro line doesn’t exist any more. You and I had to crash land into an abandoned train station to even find a way down to the Deepsea Metro,”

“Buncha weird, unexplainable stuff goin’ on,” Cuttlegum shifts his weight on the bench. “You heard Yuyu though. Maybe the only thing to be done is pack up yer feelings and go home,”

Eight feels tears prick in his eyes, which is the last thing he wants. Thinking about crying on the train in front of a bunch of people makes his stomach plummet. 

“I’m being all kinds of stupid, Cap’n,”

“Hey, they never call sailors who drown under a siren song stupid—just tragic,” 

Eight snorts.

“Yeah, tragic’s a good way to put it,”

* * *

The Deepsea Metro is never particularly full, which is probably a good thing because Mirio takes up easily the physical space of three, and with the way he’s positively vibrating as he finds Eight, he seems to light up the train car around him and he ends up filling the atmospheric space of six or seven.

“Eight, check it out!” He excitedly digs into his jeans pockets and pulls out two closed fists, which he opens to reveal nine or ten mem cakes. “Good haul today, right?” 

“Oh, yeah,” Eight summons a smile, easier to do with Mirio’s buoyant demeanor so close to him. He logs all the mem cakes Mirio had brought him, but hesitates to open up his CQ-80. 

“Aren’t ya gonna look?”

“Yeah, yeah, just…” He fiddles with the dial, swallowing before he slowly admits, “…It’s just starting to make me nervous the more time that passes. It’s been so long at this point, I’m becoming someone that for all I know isn’t like who I really am,” 

He’s not looking up at Mirio, so he hears more than sees him take a seat on the adjacent bench. 

“For what it’s worth, I’m excited for you to remember who you are,” 

Tamaki's heart clenches and he feels something lodged in his throat that he has difficulty speaking around.

“Are…are you sure you mean that, Mirio?” He manages to glance up and meet Mirio’s quizzical gaze. 

“Of course I mean it,”

There’s frustration in Eight’s exhale, despite himself. 

“But…but I’ll be different, I’ll be someone else,” 

“No, you’ll be _you_, finally,”

Heart aching, tired of the train, upset that he feels so deeply for someone so star-crossed, baffled that he’s hesitating to regain his memories, fed up with himself and with this whole promised land quest, Eight bursts,

“But what if _you_ don’t like who I really am?” 

Panic grips him as he hears the words he just said, and he drops the CQ-80 as he claps both hands over his mouth, blush filling his face all the way to his scalp and staring wide-eyed at Mirio as the clattering of the CQ-80 skittering under the bench fills the whole train car. Eight’s thankful that they’re the only ones in the car, but it’s a very, very small reprieve from the sirens going off in every corner of his brain, all signaling the flood of embarrassment and dread pouring into his body and firing between his nerves. 

Mirio’s brow is peaked as he asks, 

“Me? Why…why does it matter so much how I feel?”

Eight starts to shiver, and it’s all a familiarity that only worsens his apprehension. He can’t seem to blink or get his eyes to focus on any one thing. He can’t bring his hands all the way down from his mouth, so when he speaks, his words are echoey and muffled. 

“It…it shouldn’t matter so much, but it does,” He begins, feeling unwelcome tears start to well. “I…I’m scared to remember who I am if it means I’ll be someone you won’t know. And I know that’s stupid, I know that my priority should be getting my memory back and getting back to the surface—” He pauses to drop his hands from his mouth and scrub at his eyes with a sleeve of Mirio’s letterman’s jacket he’s wearing, cuffs rolled twice just to free up his hands. “And I know I can’t even follow you out of here, and you can’t follow _me _to the surface. I get that this is the worst thing to care about the most, I get that nothing can come of it, but that doesn’t change how I feel. I don’t want what we have to stop. I don’t want how I feel about you to change,” 

Mirio hasn’t blinked in a while, and his voice is gentle and quiet when he asks,

“‘…How you feel about me?’” 

Eight swallows back a sob. 

“…I-I…I think I…” His face crumples into hurt and vulnerable resign. “I think I’m…k-kinda really falling for you,”

He buries his face in his hands, not to cry, just to hide. Eight knows this is senseless, that he hardly knows Mirio, that Mirio can’t _possibly _know him, that he can’t possibly know _himself_, that their paths are destined to cross only on this train so far underground that he can’t even find his way out and that it’s the most inconvenient kind of attraction possible, but he’s wholly powerless to stop what’s happening in him. 

“Well…hey, I don’t think it’s possible for me to stop liking you once you get your memories back.” Eight senses that Mirio’s choosing his tone very carefully. “I think you’ll be even better, and even if you end up changing a lot, all that means is I’ll just get to introduce myself to you again, and get to know you again—the real you, right?” 

Eight tries to bite back a sob, and it’s all he can do to not break down crying, let alone answer Mirio intelligibly. He hates how familiar this feeling is, and he hates that he can’t remember _why. _

“Hey, come on,” Mirio’s voice is soft and Eight feels a hand brushing aside one of the short, navy tentacles that make up his hair. “If it helps at all, I’m kinda thinking I might be a little sweet on you, too,” 

“You are _not_,” Eight insists without thinking. 

“I am!” There’s a gentle chuckle in Mirio’s words. “I’m really invested in your story, Eight! You do realize that you’re a dimension-hopping amnesiac, right? That’s like the coolest, most fascinating thing I could imagine! I’m just some jock with average grades,” 

“You’re _amazing!” _Eight’s protest bursts from him, hands flying away from his face. “You volunteered to help me—a _stranger—_find my memories, no matter how long I was on this train! That’s like the most impossible task I can think of, and you didn’t even think twice about doing it, _and_ you didn’t care that I had nothing to give you in return! You wanted me to _sleep_ better; you went out of your way just to try and give me some decent rest and had to _walk _back to your station! You gave me your jacket, on top of everything else! And _look at you!” _In a moment of enamored madness, Eight grasps for Mirio’s fingers, holding up their entwined hands to the light and letting Mirio’s flesh all-but disappear around Eight’s hand against the brightness._ “_You’re like a ghost! Your body makes no sense but it doesn’t matter because it’s _beautiful! _How is it fair that you’re so nice _and _so breathtaking to look at?” 

Mirio chuckles, blue-grey blush highlighting the contours of his face. 

“Well damn, that’s the nicest stuff anyone’s ever said about me,” Eight’s a little winded as Mirio looks at their fingers still laced together, and it does nothing to aid his breathlessness when Mirio brings Eight’s hand to his mouth and holds it there against his lips for a moment, eyes eerily lidded and sourceless breathing slow. 

“M-Mirio?” He chokes. 

Mirio exhales and lifts his head away, blush darkening as he meets Eight’s eyes and says,

“For what it’s worth, there’s something we’ve got here that means a lot to me, too, but I’d never want you to give up your memories, especially not for me,” 

“S-So,” Eight’s brow creases, and he grips Mirio’s hand a little tighter, “So you’re saying you’re just going to get hurt at the end of this, too?”

“That’s your takeaway, Eight?” Mirio grins. “Don’t worry about me. What I’m saying is, as long as you’re stuck down here, I’m not going to stop looking for your memories. What you do with them is up to you, I guess, but I still wanna meet whoever’s hiding up here,” He lifts his other hand and softly presses a fingertip to Eight’s temple. “Don’t you?” 

Eight crumbles into Mirio’s palm, and the chuckle that escapes him is tense and watery at the edges as tears threaten to spill again.

“You’re good at pep talks, too? That’s not fair,” 

Mirio grins and lets Eight rest his face in his hand, running a thumb along his cheekbone. 

“Sorry, I’ve basically been gettin’ by my whole life on charm alone, guess I can’t really turn it off,” His ears perk as the next station is announced, and his brows peak softly. “Do you want me to stay?” 

Eight shakes his head, even as he covers Mirio’s hand with his own and presses his cheek harder into the unearthly palm. 

“Go home, I’ll be here,” 

Mirio lets Eight nuzzle into his hand until the train doors slide open, then stands from the bench to the full foot-and-a-half above Eight, and it’s a slow process to unwind their fingers.

“I’ll see you soon, right?” 

“Yeah,”

Mirio vanishes like he has so many times before into the darkness beyond the train doors that’s impossible for Eight to pierce. He scrubs at his face and sinks onto the bench of the empty train car, drawing his knees up to his chin as the Metro begins to move once more. After a few minutes, after he’s sure another wave of tears won’t overtake him, he fishes the CQ-80 out from under the bench and opens up the new mem cake entires. None of them are his memories.


	3. Chapter 3

Though he’s been wrestling with it, resigning himself to permanent amnesia still puts a nauseous fear in him, and when he recovers the fourth thang and he still hasn’t come across the mem cake that could restore his memory, it makes an iciness take root in his stomach that he can’t shake. 

The telephone’s ringing. 

“Whaddya say, Eight?” The Captain asks as Eight stares at the phone, and it’s a question he has to consider for a long moment. Perhaps picking up on his hesitation, the Captain adds, “Do you wanna head back down and keep passing trials to see if yer mem cake’s at the end of one of ‘em?” 

Eight flicks his gaze to the Captain, tone uncertain as he asks,

“That’s okay with you?”

“I can ride the rails a bit longer. My granddaughters've got everything runnin’ smoothly without me,” He gives a sidelong grin. “I used to be a brawler, you know. I’m up for some more action,” 

Eight exhales.

“Yeah. Yeah, if it’s alright…then this can wait,” 

And he gets back on the Metro, leaving the phone to its ringing in the cavernous, empty station. 

* * *

For someone as thrown to the tides as he is, Eight continues to knock out platform after platform with a clarity and drive that even the idol girls comment on as impressive, but it’s a demeanor far from easy to maintain. There’s a chill in his blood every time he thinks about the telephone just ringing and ringing to nobody, waiting for him to come back and answer it, and then…well, hopefully he’ll get to go back to the surface. But not before he exhausts every option he has down here. Not before he knows he’s tried everything—both to find his memories, and also to do the one thing he can think of that might lift whatever magic it is that’s denying him access to the Deepsea city. 

It’s not completely without reprieve. He’d opened his CQ-80 several times to a new mem cake entry and felt a welcome rush of recognition—for the Squid Sisters, for Octo valley, the Octarian Army and DJ Octavio…Pieces of his world are coming back to him bit by bit, but nothing about himself that he can’t conclude on his own, and it continues like this until he’s completed every trial and there are no more mem cakes left for him to find at the platforms. There’s a certain pressure collapsing his chest in as he holds the last mem cake and remembers nothing relevant, but he swallows resolutely, knowing there’s still another, different door barred to him that maybe he’s just unlocked. 

It’s with his breath held that he waits for the doors of the train to open at the first stop after finishing all the trials. He follows two or three other passengers as they exit, hoping he can maybe ride their momentum out into the city, but when he steps from the train and his foot lands on the platform of a trial he’d passed a while back—still waiting for him to retake, should he choose—his features crumble and it’s all he can do to stand on the platform and hold himself together until he can summon the strength to get back on the Metro. 

All that’s left for him to do is go back to Central Station and see if answering that phone will take him back to the surface. He asks the Captain if he would be fine waiting long enough for Eight to say goodbye to Mirio, and in an odd moment of mentorship, Cuttlegum actually ruffles Eight’s hair. That’s all the answer he gives, but it’s all that Eight needs. 

* * *

Eight sits with Mirio’s letterman’s jacket folded in his lap. He knows what line Mirio uses and at which station he’ll board, but despite knowing, when the train doors slide open and he sees Mirio’s towering outline, he still feels a piercing twinge—because the hardest part comes next. 

“Eight,” Already his voice is hesitant as his eyes flick to the folded jacket in Eight’s hands. “…You got through them all, huh? Any luck?”

He shakes his head, voice thin. 

“Nothing worked…I couldn’t find my memories, and…I tried, but…it looks like I still can’t leave the train with you,” 

Mirio’s expression—usually unshakable in its sunniness—falters, and for some reason that’s what hurts Eight the most in the moment. 

“So this is your last Metro ride? You’re heading home?”

“I think so,” There’s so much he wants to say, but all he can summon is a downcast stare as he offers Mirio the jacket back. “Thank you for letting me borrow this. I actually thought about asking if I could keep it, but if I’m going where I hope I’m going, it’ll probably just get ruined with a bunch of ink. Having it as a pillow really made sleeping a lot easier,”

“_Do_ you wanna keep it?”

Eight gives a tight chuckle.

“That’s okay,” He chews his lip during the small silence as Mirio accepts his jacket and shrugs into it. “Mirio, you made this whole thing a lot easier for me. It got pretty rough sometimes, it was nice having your company to look forward to,” 

“You think you’ll visit?” 

Eight’s shoulders wilt around a swallow and a sigh.

“It’s…nearly impossible to get down here…I don’t even really know how I did in the first place…”

“Right. Okay,” 

He feels Mirio’s weight on the bench next to him and a dense arm loops around his middle, softly drawing him into Mirio’s side. There’s nothing but the rattle of the train around them for a few minutes. 

“You’re sure you don’t wanna stick around for a while longer? I can keep looking—”

“No, no, that’s okay. You’ve done so much already. I can’t ask you to keep looking with a heading so vague as ‘around the Deepsea Metro, _I think,’_ and especially not when I can’t even go out there to help you look,” He scrubs at his face. “I’m just, you know,” He glances up through his fingers, flush settling through his ears. “…happy I got to meet you,” 

“I’ll try to figure out how to get up to the surface when all this is done,”

“Well, I’d tell you where to find me, but I don’t remember where I live…guess I’ll have to sort that out first. Still, I hope you can figure out a way to get up there,” 

“I’m sure I can! The only thing stopping me is some jargon about Denizens of the Deep not being allowed up there, right? I’m pretty confident I can charm my way past anybody who tries to slow me down,” 

His grin is steadfast and Eight dares to lean his head against Mirio’s broad, soft side. Despite figuring that the reason that “jargon” exists in the first place is that the Metro line leading to the surface has been somehow destroyed for an inconceivably long time and its inaccessibility has morphed into superstition, he’s loath to puncture Mirio’s sunniness by voicing that thought—especially not now. He inhales and instead murmurs,

“Yeah. Things’re changing up on the surface if I heard right. Octolings are coming out of the woodwork in Inkopolis. Maybe it won’t be so long before there won’t even be that jargon stopping you from coming up,”

“That’s the spirit,” There’s a tense exhale around his grin, Eight can feel the added weight of it from where he’s tucked into Mirio’s side. “You know, I was actually cleaning my dorm room yesterday. I was really hoping to have you over, and I guess I was nervous about first impressions,”

“I don’t think it would’ve mattered what your room looked like,” Eight manages a soft laugh. “If I could’ve gone anywhere halfway private with you, stuff like laundry on the floor wouldn’t’ve slowed me down,” 

“Oh,” Mirio gulps next to him, the pressure of the fingers at his waist wavering a little. Eight glances up.

“Is that shallow of me?” 

“No, no, that’s not it,” Mirio chuckles, hazy blush darkening to the point where it’s listing close to purple. “I feel the same…it’s just, this is a weird time to air all this stuff, but I get that it’s also the only time, right?” He swallows, and the breath he lets out is almost frustrated, something Eight hasn’t witnessed from him. “This sucks. One sec,” 

He shuffles around in his front pocket for a moment and pulls out a faded receipt and half a pencil, scribbling an address and a phone number in boxy, all-caps letters and offering the note to Eight. 

“The number’s there if you want it. I won’t ask you to stay in touch if you don’t want to keep investing in a dead end, but if you’re ever able to make it past the Metro and you’re still interested, come find me. I’ll be waiting,” Eight gingerly takes the receipt and folds it in half, message-in to preserve its contents, and zips it into his chest pocket. Mirio gives a soft chuckle and adds, “Would it be just completely tasteless to send nudes to you in the meantime?” 

Eight lets out a tight, high-pitched laugh, blush on his features undeniable. 

“I guess I _am_ curious what you’re packing, if nothing else,”

“I don’t wanna tease you _too _bad,”

Eight can tell he’s trying to make light of the impossibility of this thing they have—whatever it is—going any further, but to his surprise, it’s sort of working, and a soft smile worms its way over his face. Mirio’s really good at smoothing things over and making the best of a situation, and something about that ability just makes Eight all the more attracted, which in turn makes this all the more difficult as Mirio’s stop is announced as next down the line.

“Kiss goodbye?”

Eight jerks his eyes up to meet Mirio’s, not sure if he’s making a joke, but the hazy blue flush highlighting his features begs to differ. 

“U-Um…would that make this easier or harder?”

“That’s up to you,” 

Eight drops his gaze. 

“I…I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m the sentimental type,” 

“Haha! Fair enough,” Mirio’s tone is steadfastly light as the train slows and he unwinds his arm from around Eight, standing and rubbing at the back of his neck. “I’ll be thinkin’ of you,” 

“I’ll miss you, Mirio,”

The last of the train car’s passengers leave with Mirio in tow, and the hiss of the train door sliding closed leaves Eight totally alone. He swallows, eyes finding the floor, heart still thudding with a need doomed to be left unmet, among other things. He rests his forehead in his hands and leans forward, bracing his elbows on his knees for a moment as the train begins to move again. The Captain’s in the other train car, Eight should go and confirm for him that he’s ready to go back to the telephone now, but he just needs a minute to himself—maybe to come down from the flurry of everything that’s happened, maybe to come to terms with it, he doesn’t exactly know—but standing seems like a monstrous effort right now, so he just lets the thrum of the train fill his head until it begins to slow under him at the next station. 

He sighs and scrubs at his face as the Metro comes to a stop, lifting his head from his hands as the doors slide open. There’s thirty seconds or so where the train waits for passengers to board, though it looks like nobody’s getting on at this station. Eight sighs. The doors begin to close and he’s about to stand to go locate the Captain, but in the same moment a translucent arm jams itself between the doors, and as they stutter back open, a winded Mirio bursts back into the train car. The shock and confusion jolting through Eight push him up off the bench, and he’s suddenly moving across the train car at a decent clip toward Mirio, worry creasing his brows. 

“Mirio? Did you _run _to the next stop? What—”

Wordlessly—maybe because he’s breathing too hard to speak, maybe because showing him is the best explanation there is—Mirio holds out his hand toward Eight, opening his fingers to reveal a single mem cake. It’s in the shape of a little navy Octoling, hair in his eyes and clinging to the sides of his face. Eight gasps, and the momentum of the train beginning to move under him again nearly knocks him over. Mirio’s other hand shoots out and grips Eight by the wrist to steady him, then slides to interlace his fingers with Eight’s as the inertia evens out. Eight stares at the mem cake. 

“Saw this right as the doors closed behind me,” Mirio says, still winded but with enough breath in him to speak. “And I’m not in Track and Field for nothing,” He gives a breathless chuckle, then swallows. “Eight…what’s your real name? I wanna know,” 

With shaking hands, Eight gathers his memories from Mirio’s translucent palm, and his CQ-80 chimes with recognition. He stares at it for a long moment before he opens up the display and navigates to where his memories are waiting for him. Like the rest of the entries, his CQ-80 has conjured up a rhyme to translate the contents of the mem cake, and his heart thuds as he reads. 

_Eating suns like a black hole, _

_ I’ll hold back tears and face my fears, _

_ Nerves won’t keep me from my goal. _

Like surfacing from a body of ice-cold water onto a familiar shore, suddenly breathless and shivering, he looks up from the display to meet Mirio’s wide, dark eyes. 

“I’m Tamaki…my name’s Tamaki,” 

Mirio’s elated smile shines brightly enough to light the entire Deepsea city. In a rush of movement, Mirio stoops down and gathers Tamaki into a crushing embrace, lifting him clear off his feet and jostling him enough that the CQ-80 falls from his hands and clatters onto the floor. 

“It’s so great to meet you, Tamaki!” 

Tamaki remembers that he’d usually feel that this is a mortifying display, but they’re alone in the train car, so in the moment he’s content to meet Mirio’s excitement and laugh breathlessly into his hair, looping his arms around Mirio’s shoulders and returning the embrace as best he can. Tamaki’s feet are hovering over one of the benches, and after a few moments of excitable, directionless chatter into Tamaki’s shoulder, Mirio loosens his grasp enough that Tamaki can slide through his arms and stand on the bench at equal height with Mirio, still clutched to his chest with an exuberance that vibrates clear through him and into Tamaki. 

Breath finally evening out, Mirio unwinds his arms from around Tamaki, hands sliding to rest at his waist. There’s a grey flush clear to his hairline, and he levels his solid-blue gaze to Tamaki’s. After a shallow swallow, he asks,

“So, is Tamaki the sentimental type?” 

Tamaki, heart pounding, gulps and flicks his gaze around the train car one more time to confirm that they’re alone before drawing his arms from around Mirio’s shoulders and cupping his face with both hands, frenetically pulling Mirio’s mouth over his own. 

Whatever it is that’s composing Mirio, it’s firmer here at his mouth, probably to help hold together the teeth and tongue and larynx that he’s employing as he presses Tamaki up against the train window through their kissing, vibrations from his shallow vocalizations carried through his teeth, the sound wholly different from the boisterousness Tamaki’s heard up til now. Clutching at Mirio’s hair is like grabbing a fistful of gummy worms, and he can’t help the intrusive thought that blunders through his brain that he bets Mirio has hair like this elsewhere, feeling his blush darkening. 

Mirio’s grip on Tamaki’s waist nearly covers the whole circumference of it, and the pressure doesn’t let up as Mirio pulls his mouth away, one knee on the train bench, pressing his chest into Tamaki’s torso as he pins him against the train window. Distantly Tamaki thinks that he’d like to get down, suddenly fearful of the Metro pulling into the next station while he’s so clearly displayed in the middle of such a lewd make-out. 

“I wanna take you home,” Mirio says after a gulp, and Tamaki’s all at once dragged back into the sad, frustrated headspace he was in before Mirio burst back into the Metro.

“I want to leave with you, but I don’t know what to do,” He croaks. “I’ve tried everything,”

“I know,” Mirio swallows again and shifts his knee from the bench, letting Tamaki stand straighter and lift the back of his head from the glass of the window. “But I want you to know I don’t care that it’s pointless and impossible, I’m going to feel what I’m going to feel—I want you to know you’re not alone there,” 

The train is slowing under them, and Tamaki feels a pit in his stomach that urges him to get down off the bench. Mirio takes a step back to let him hop down, and Tamaki again has to crane his head back to make eye contact as the train comes to a stop. Distantly he hears other passengers begin to board, and now with other Denizens in the train car with them, Tamaki feels a distinct hesitance to engage in any further displays with Mirio, whether they be consoling or passionate. Worried he’ll waste Mirio’s time by asking him to stay on the Metro the rest of the way to Central Station when Tamaki can’t summon enough courage to even kiss him again, he says, eyes finding the floor,

“Your stop is getting farther away…you…you should go…”

He senses Mirio deflate.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah…I still need to go home…” He blinks, and a small smile crosses his face. _“Home,” _He says again, hugging his elbows. “I know where home is,” He glances up, meeting Mirio’s dark eyes, drawing breath to speak but throat closing around his words. What more can even be said? After a gulp, Tamaki continues, “I couldn’t look for mem cakes outside the train. I wouldn’t have remembered without your help…I don’t have a way to repay you,” 

“You just did, don’t worry about it. I’d been thirsty for a kiss for a hot second,” Mirio’s grin is genuine and without tension or regret, and it helps alleviate a little the helplessness Tamaki feels as the train resumes moving under them. 

* * *

Tamaki stares at his feet next to the Captain as the telephone rings. He doesn’t want to look up for a number of reasons, but among them is if he does, the tears welled in his eyes will definitely spill and track down his face. 

“Eight?—Er, Tamaki?” 

Tamaki shakes himself and takes a step forward. The mechanism—whatever it is—that allows this phone to communicate just starts talking as soon as he approaches, and Tamaki answers yes to the string of questions without really hearing them, just trying not to cry harder, already functionally blind through the tears he’s managed to hold in. 

“Congratulations, number 10,008! The door to the promised land will now open!” 

“Okay,” 

Tamaki paces back to where the Captain is, and behind him he vaguely hears something that probably would be disconcerting to see, considering the rumble is loud enough to rattle the cement under his feet, but he doesn’t care. He just wants out. He can’t look up from his feet and he doesn’t want to cry. He wants to go back to the surface and try to let go of his desire for Mirio’s company, try to put away his curiosity about the Deepsea city, try not to pine for the impossible. His mind goes to the receipt in his pocket with Mirio’s address and number, and there’s a part of him that wants to leave it on the platform as he numbly walks with the Captain through the door that had materialized. He knows now that if he gives himself any shred of hope that he can conceivably return, or that there’s any way for the Denizens of the Deep to rediscover how to travel to the surface, he’ll never stop hurting, but a squeal and a click of the door sealing shut behind him bring him back enough that he can take in the harrowing words that vibrate through the glass tube he’d ended up in. 

“Ingredient acquisition complete. Reformatting matter…”

Tamaki feels Cuttlegum stiffen at his side.

“Hey…what did that thing say?”

Tamaki blinks, a familiar horror gripping him—but this time, with tangible cause. The sound of whirring blades over his head yanks his attention upward and the tears fall as he jerks his gaze from the floor. 

It’s a trap…it’s a trap, and Tamaki had been digging his own grave this whole time. He’d been a dead Octoling walking and had forged something with Mirio on borrowed time, and if he’d felt guilty that he’d wasted Mirio’s time before, now it stings even more. He’d tricked Mirio into falling for a ghost and Tamaki hadn’t even known it. He winces at a painful stab of remorse before he feels fear overtake everything. Over the walkie-talkie, Nejire and Yuyu are screaming for them to do _something, _and the Captain is already pounding at the thick glass with his fists trying to escape the descending blades, but to no avail. 

…Panic—there’s nothing left to do but panic. Tamaki is about to open his mouth to scream, not even certain sound will come out of his throat, when in his periphery, he sees timber and insulation burst away from something breaking through the ceiling of the station. 

The Inkling that tears through the air toward their death trap has his hair swept up and back from his forehead, numerous crimson tentacles spiked like horns—Tamaki gets a good look at them as he collides head-first with the phone, head-butting it with enough force and inertia to knock the whole mechanism over, and the glass prison shatters as it impacts with the cement floor. 

Tamaki covers his face, tucking his legs to his chin as the glass shards settle around him, and when the tinkling has stopped he cautiously peeks through his fingers. The phone had been knocked from the top of the blender, and seems to be inactive several feet away. There’s a gaping hole in the ceiling, and laying on his back, surrounded by a halo of glass, is their mysterious savior. 

“Agent Three!” Cuttlegum charges toward the prone Inkling. Over the walkie talkie, Tamaki can hear Nejire and Yuyu clamoring with a mix of relief and reinvigorated spirit. Tamaki shakily stands and scuttles over to where the red-haired Inkling had landed, trying not to step on any glass.

“Where have you been?” Cuttlegum says, nearly with a scolding tone. Tamaki peeks over the Captain’s shoulder to see Three barely hanging onto consciousness, a nasty bruise already flushing across his scalp and down his forehead, but he chuckles, a wide, sharp grin on his features regardless. 

“Rad! That was the manliest thing I’ve ever done!” 

And then he passes out. 

“Damn it, Three,” The Captain gives a rough sigh, glancing over his shoulder at Tamaki. “This ain’t the first time he’s hurt himself to buy me time. I’ll have to give him an earful when he comes to,” He scrubs at his face, tone softening. “Glad to have him back, though,” His gaze falls to Three’s side, eyeing something he’d probably dropped on impact. “Hey, what’s that?”

Over the walkie talkie, Yuyu’s voice chimes,

“I think that might be an employee-model CQ-80,” 

“Whoah!” Nejire’s voice is clear enough that it seems to be coming from right over Yuyu’s shoulder.

“Give me a moment, I’ll see if I can access it,” There are a few beats of relative silence, broken only by the phone’s occasional weak, strained clattering and the muffled sounds of Yuyu’s keyboard. When she speaks again, there’s a rare enthusiasm in her tone. “I think these are blueprints to the entire Kamabo Corp test facility!” Tamaki and Cuttlegum’s gazes meet, each coming to the realization in the same moment as Yuyu finishes, “I think we can use these to get you out of there!”

The Captain punches the air and exclaims, loudly enough to startle Tamaki,

“I knew you’d come through for us, Three!” 

Yuyu’s voice continues, 

“To start, it seems you’ll need to head up through that hole Agent Three made,” 

The Captain flicks his gaze between Three and Tamaki, pausing long enough that Tamaki knows what he’s going to say before he says it, and it puts a pit in his stomach.

“I should wait here until Three wakes up. You go on ahead,” 

“You’re sure?” Tamaki knows that he is, but the prospect of going alone through uncharted danger makes his hands go cold. “I…I think there’s going to be a lot of trouble up ahead,”

“You can handle it, Tamaki,” The Captain grins. “Just look what you accomplished without even knowing yer name. What’s gonna stop you, now?” 

Tamaki swallows, letting the moment of silence stretch before giving a shallow but resolute nod and turning to launch himself toward the hole in the ceiling of the station. 


	4. Chapter 4

Tamaki didn’t talk much about the NILS battle after returning to Inkopolis—partly because he didn’t want the attention, partly because he figured nobody would believe him. A giant underwater statue of a long-extinct species piloted by an AI gone rogue and equipped to destroy a whole city is a story so wild he hardly believes it himself, despite being a member of the party that took it down. Sure, the NILS statue didn’t sink all the way into the ocean in the aftermath, but the news about it wasn’t as clear and detailed as Tamaki knew the case to be. He supposes nothing like the terror Tartar had planned came to pass, so maybe it’s better not to incite worry that the threat had existed at all.

What he cared about much, much more, the news and updates of which he took care to follow closely, was that the Deepsea Metro line to the surface was being rebuilt. 

After the NILS incident, reestablishing communication with the Denizens of the Deep became a priority, since it was the Deepsea Metro that had been the vehicle—literally and figuratively—that had facilitated the deaths of who knows how many (supposedly, less than ten thousand and eight, though that’s a very small comfort). Tamaki’s stomach still turns when he thinks about the green ooze that had clung to Three’s head, about the “sanitized” Octolings…all of it had been going on for ages, and he’d been lucky to stop Tartar’s rampage instead of end up as another one of his ingredients, along with the Captain. The Deepsea Metro employees were suspect as complicit, but quickly the air was cleared when CQ Cumber had exhibited horror at the news that those who retrieved all four thangs ended up pureed. 

After contact and investigation, efforts to rebuild the part of the Deepsea Metro line leading to the surface that had long since collapsed and been forgotten were put into effect, as Inkopolis was quickly becoming a mecca for creatures of many types since the emergence of reborn Octolings into the fray. 

When Tamaki had stood on the helicopter, breathless and shaking and covered in ink as the NILS statue smoked and sank, he’d clapped a hand to the pocket on his vest, afraid the paper Mirio had given him with his number and address might have been lost. To his immense relief, it remained safe against his chest, but as it turns out, signal doesn’t reach from the surface to the Deep, and every attempt to send a text to Mirio had been spat back as undeliverable. Mirio had specified that if Tamaki didn’t want to stay in touch, he didn’t have to, and this puts an anxious edge to the underside of his days, afraid with every passing hour of not hearing from Tamaki, Mirio’s either getting more hurt or more over him. Tamaki has no other choice but to bear the nervousness and wait until the line to the Deep has been completed, and even then…can Tamaki access the Deepsea city, or is whatever magic that had teleported him still affecting him as a prior applicant? 

Boarding the freshly installed train line months later feels like a fever dream, and over and over again Tamaki tells himself that Kamabo Corp had been disbanded, so whatever technology Tartar had been employing to yank Tamaki out of his dimension and deposit him into test chambers must have been disabled…right?

He’s about to find out.

His heart hammers as he pulls into Central Station, properly this time, by rail instead of walking for who knows how long along a derelict set of train tracks. He feels a certain trepidation as he paces through the platform to where he’d boarded and exited the Deepsea Metro months prior to deliver his own death trap segment by segment to an insane AI, and as he glances up he can still see the ghost of where Three had crashed through the ceiling, the paint a lighter color where the roof had been patched. 

Familiar outlines begin cropping up as Tamaki ventures further into the Deep on the Metro toward Mirio’s stop (he couldn’t possibly forget which stop is Mirio’s). CQ Cumber expresses that he’s glad to see him again, and they talk for a while about Kamabo Corp and the changes that the Metro had to undergo in light of the parent company imploding. He chews his lip, silent for a moment and afraid to ask, but he presses through the nerves and says, 

“When you went to those platforms with me, are they…I mean, do you still go to them?”

“I only ever had access to those tests when an applicant was with me,” Cumber’s features are inscrutable, but the way his tendrils lift a little gives Tamaki the impression that he’s studying him. “I haven’t been back, since there are no longer any applicants to open the way for me,” 

Still no answers then—no choice but to wait until the last second to find out, it seems. As Tamaki flicks his gaze away to his feet, Cumber apologizes in a sad murmur for not knowing what happened to the applicants who completed Tartar’s quest. Tamaki’s stomach turns, but he can at least put Cumber’s mind at ease by acknowledging that it wasn’t his fault. This seems to lift his spirits a little, and Tamaki sees his chance and extricates himself from the dialogue as politely as he can, making his way back to his seat before the added anxiety of speaking to someone aloud about his fears of still being confined to the Metro compounds enough to make him start shivering. 

His leg starts to bounce as the train nears Mirio’s stop, and there’s a moment where he hesitates. With his phone without service this far underground and just as useless topside in contacting Mirio to tell him where he can find Tamaki should he come to the surface, this is his last bastion of hope that he can reconnect with Mirio—and that frightens him. He’d hedged his bets, and should he step from the train and find himself again transported to a dimension with a trial waiting for him to complete to ascertain his viability as a specimen, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Go home, he supposes. But not before his heart breaks and he’s left to steep in regret and helplessness in the face of a spell he can’t break keeping him in star-crossed fashion from someone he desperately needs to see again, and the thought of the distinct possibility of that future coming to pass strains his frail heart enough to give him pause, thinking maybe it’s better to just leave it be—but he still finds himself standing as the doors of the Metro open at Mirio’s stop. 

He squeezes his eyes shut, heart pounding and hands cold as he crosses the threshold, waiting until both his feet are planted to exhale and open his eyes, but before he can, he feels a bump at his shoulder and he’s jostled a little to the side. He glances up to see a passenger who’d disembarked with him apologizing for bumping into him, and as they go along their way, Tamaki’s line of sight travels in a long, slow arc to take in his surroundings. 

It’s dark. But that means it worked. 

His heart is beating so fast it feels like one continuous jet of blood through him, but that just carries the exhilarated relief through his body faster as he looks at the unearthly strings of lights adorning blue-black roads into the city and away from the train. He smiles cautiously and follows their glow, stopping only once at the station kiosk to ask for a map (though it takes him a minute to drum up the sentence and repeat it in his head to perfection before approaching the booth). 

The Deepsea city is eerie and has a vastly different atmospheric vibe than Inkopolis, butit’s beautiful and fascinating to look at. It’s sort of like looking at a city at night (though it’s only midmorning on the surface), but in a way that confuses how his brain is used to interpreting darkness. Nothing is exactly black…or, maybe it is, but the edges of everything seem to glow with something that’s _light-adjacent_ and fluctuating in a spectrum of neon bioluminescence that surface creatures must not have evolved to perceive in its totality. It’s not just random circulations of colors, either—the whole city seems to be sharing the same pulse of purple to pink to blue, waves rippling through the structures like the tide, painting the whole of the city like it’s a single, living organism. It’s dizzying to take in, and several times Tamaki gets disoriented enough that he has to backtrack for several intersections and resume the correct path to Deepsea U—where he hopes to find Mirio. 

He clutches in each hand the map from the train station and the faded receipt with Mirio’s address on it, respectively, checking both of them no less than every five paces. When he finally sees Deepsea U crest the horizon, it takes his breath away in more than one sense. The structure of it is unmistakably a college, but the shapes chosen in the architecture are softer, more alien, like Mirio’s body itself. It’s incredible to observe, but the thrill in his insides is much, much more heavily credited to the thought that Mirio might be within those walls. Tamaki gulps and continues toward the college, pocketing the map.

* * *

After backtracking through several corridors and trying to discern which direction down any given hall would lead to higher or lower dorm numbers, he’s finally, nervously, standing at Mirio’s door. He holds Mirio’s note up to the number on the doorframe, checking and re-checking that this is right and he’s not going to be disturbing a stranger with a misplaced knock. He slips the receipt into his pocket and raises a shaking hand to the door, rapping twice and losing courage halfway through to add a third. 

It occurs to him only now that Mirio might not be in, and that he doesn’t have a plan for what to do should that be the case. He doesn’t have anywhere to go and wait for twenty minutes, let alone several hours or…what if Mirio’s out of town? Or worse, enough time has passed, what if Mirio doesn’t even live in this dorm room anymore? There’s a distinct part of him that wants to run as he hears footsteps approaching—confident that someone is home to offer a solution to his first fear, but adding conflict to his second, as it might be a new tenant—but Tamaki’s come this far; one more hurdle to overcome to try and reconnect with Mirio is just a drop in the ocean. He inhales sharply and holds his breath as the handle turns. 

The silhouette that fills the doorframe is a little familiar, but with the light down here the way it is and how the figure is softly glowing in a way that’s hard for Tamaki’s brain to interpret, the face is difficult to discern in its entirety. All Tamaki can really clearly see is a pair of round eyes, reflective and glittery and greenish like marbles. There’s an exhale and neither party moves for a moment. 

“I-I’m looking for Mirio?” Tamaki manages. 

The silhouette shifts, taking a half step back and leaning toward a space inside the dorm out of Tamaki’s line of sight. 

“Holy whoah…you’re not gonna believe this, Mirio—that Octoling you were talking about? He made it down h—”

There’s a crash and a mad scramble, and the Sea Angel that had greeted Tamaki has to leap back to avoid getting caught up in the line of fire from Mirio barreling through his dorm toward the door. When he whips around the corner of the doorframe, it’s made obvious that Tamaki hadn’t quite remembered just how _tall _Mirio is, as he stands head and shoulders above his green-eyed roommate. There’s a jab of panic in his insides that if it’s been long enough for his memory of Mirio to start degrading, then maybe…maybe the fire’s died, maybe it’s been too long to rekindle the flare of attraction between them, maybe he’s too late—

“I knew you’d come! As soon as I heard the news about the Metro, I knew you’d come!” And Tamaki is swept up into a fevered embrace, lifted from the floor and crushed close to a familiar, giving sort of composition that, in this weird, purplish light, seems to glow. Tamaki distantly thinks that maybe this is why Mirio’s species is called the Sea Angel, ethereal and luminous. 

“M-Mirio,” Tamaki wriggles his arms free, pushing gently at Mirio’s shoulders and trying to disentangle himself, nervous that all this is taking place in the hallway, _and _in front of Mirio’s roommate. “Mirio, I’m happy to see you too, b-but—”

“Sorry, sorry,” Mirio leans back, but doesn’t set Tamaki down. “I’m just so happy…I thought maybe, when I didn’t hear from you…but then, with the train being reconnected to the surface…so then I figured—”

Tamaki can’t quite take in all of Mirio’s excitable half-sentences, on the one hand still embarrassed that this display is actively being witnessed by at least one, and is only some curiously opened doors away from more. On the other though, he can’t stop staring at Mirio. His eyes are reflective and mesmerizing in this light, glowing a soft blue and illuminating the flesh around the spheres like a flashlight held to gelatin, dispersing softly through the rest of his features. If Tamaki thought Mirio was entrancing before, he’s totally and irrefutably under his spell now. 

* * *

After Mirio’s initial exuberance has quieted and Tamaki gathers the courage to actually enter the dorm, he finds himself in what looks like a single square living space (furnished like the inside of a lava lamp), but upon squinting he can make out that the walls are actually sliding doors in some places, presumably leading to extra storage or rooms. The layout isn’t intuitive, and it doesn’t help that he can’t see that well in here, as the way light works flattens the depth of everything except for the Sea Angels’ brilliant shapes in the purplish darkness, so when Mirio invites Tamaki to “make himself comfortable,” he hesitates, not sure exactly where would be appropriate to do so. From behind him, he hears a soft inhale. 

“Mirio, um…do…do you need the place to yourself?” 

Tamaki feels a flush rocket across the back of his neck and he desperately wants to melt into the floor. Mirio whirls around and hooks an arm around his roommate's shoulders, turning him away from Tamaki and drawing his head in closer to murmur, 

“You’d do that, Izzy? I know there’s no notice, he and I couldn’t really plan—”

“Sure…I get it,” 

Tamaki senses Mirio chewing at the inside of his cheek. 

“Lemme check,” He slides his arm away, turning back to Tamaki and brightening as he says, “There’s a balcony, the view of the campus is pretty sweet, if you wanna take a look?”

Tamaki is happy to make an escape from Mirio’s roommate, who is obviously more than on the level that Tamaki showed up on their doorstep unannounced with the sole intention of making good on a promise borne of sexual tension that had built months prior. 

“Yeah, yeah I really wanna see,”

* * *

Mirio wasn’t lying, the scope of the campus is beautiful, the buildings all glowing and pulsing, but his heart is pounding in his ears and distracting him from any other sensory input than Mirio’s arm brushing his shoulder at his side as he leans on the railing. 

“So…” Mirio begins, a slight but undeniable nervous flutter in his timbre. “I know that you’re, you know, _here_ and all, but I need to ask…how you feel…has anything changed?” 

Tamaki flushes and glances to his hands, gulping before breathing his soft reply. 

“…No,” 

“Cool,” He senses Mirio grin. “I’m sure you figured from the scene I made that I still feel the same, too,” 

He feels a small smile worm its way through his nerves and onto his features. 

“It was a relief…I’d figured there was a decent chance that, well…you know, it’s been a long time, and of course you have plenty of other options, being on a campus and all…I couldn’t assume you were waiting for a surface denizen that wasn’t even texting you,”

“That’s the weird thing, though, huh?” Mirio’s voice is soft, but full of an honest kind of vulnerability. “Considering all that, you’d think that my feelings would’ve faded, but they just haven’t. I think we just went through too much together for college hunks to catch my eye,” 

Tamaki snickers. 

“Is that usually your type?” 

“Oh no, just using it as an example. No, I definitely have a thing for short guys,” 

“Hey, I’m really tall for an Octoling,” 

Mirio lets a breath through his grin, turning and looping an arm around Tamaki’s waist, lifting him easily off the ground to eye level with him, despite Tamaki’s small sounds of protest, feet dangling near Mirio’s knees. 

“For an Octoling,” He says with a smirk, and Tamaki’s insides immediately shiver at the smug flirtation, paired with witnessing Mirio’s otherworldly luminance so close. Tamaki swallows, bashfulness suddenly robbing his mind of any clever banter. 

“Wh-Why is that your thing?” He stutters, knowing in the back of his mind that he’d just let the moment to kiss Mirio pass. 

“I want people to feel safe around me. I figure, the bigger the height difference, the safer they’ll feel. Among other reasons,” He cocks a brow, and the glittery blue of his eyes glints devilishly. “So considering I’ve got upwards of a foot and a half on you, I hope you’ll feel really well taken care of,” 

The nervous energy in Tamaki’s stomach drains down to his belt at Mirio’s words and urges him to cling to Mirio and kiss him so thoroughly that the glow from inside him sticks to Tamaki’s tongue, but all he can summon is a swallow and a soft whine, still too entranced by taking in Mirio’s luminescence at such a small distance to act on any urgent, kinetic impulses. 

“So,” Mirio’s pitch is suddenly lower, voice coming from deeper within him. “Am I taking my roomie up on his offer to give us free reign of the place?” 

Tamaki crumbles under his tone, under the promise of his words, and feverishly lifts his knees to hook his legs around Mirio’s waist, formlessly and needfully shoving his mouth over Mirio’s. Mirio rises to his reciprocation with zero hesitance, taking two paces forward and trapping Tamaki between his chest and the wall, forcefully enough to draw a gasp from Tamaki, but it only redoubles his instinct to climb and clutch and cling to the Sea Angel as his fingers scrabble for purchase somewhere in his anemone-like hair. He feels Mirio’s hands slide from his waist to where his knees are pressed into Mirio’s middle, and a thrill like falling rockets through him when Mirio closes his hands around Tamaki’s calves and yanks, at once pushing Tamaki into the wall of the balcony and pulling him into his chest, and though Tamaki wouldn’t have opted to wriggle out of his grip, moving at all aside from his arms is a now distinct impossibility.

Tamaki clutches at the collar of Mirio’s shirt, dragging him by the neck harder against his mouth in response, provoking a sound from Mirio’s throat that he’s not expecting, but he revels in the heady feeling it sparks in his ribcage, sharp and frenetic like anxiety but melting through him like calmness would. It’s something he feverishly chases after, introducing teeth in an effort to hear more of Mirio’s vocalizations. Mirio jolts against him, inhaling sharply and pulling back from Tamaki’s mouth, and for a moment he’s afraid that he overstepped, that he took it too far, and through the fog of need in his brain, segments of a nervous apology begin floating toward each other, but Mirio’s sharp, hungry grin allows them to disperse in a wave of relief.

Breathless, Mirio murmurs, 

“I take it that’s a yes,” 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S ALWAYS BEEN THE PLAN TO HAVE LOTS OF MONSTER FUCKERY AND INTERSPECIES PANEENS IN THIS FIC, BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THE BIRTHDAY GIRL ASKED FOR. THIS IS WHERE THE EXPLICIT RATING COMES IN. IT'S TAKEN ME 9 WEEKS TO WRITE THIS CHAPTER SO PLEASE, IF THIS ISN'T YOUR THING, CONSIDER CHAPTER 4 THE LAST ONE OF THE FIC. Anyway, @hedgehogofspades, birthday cake is served, come and eat. <3

Tamaki opts to wait on the balcony as Mirio speaks with Izuku, too mortified at the prospect of being in the same space as someone who knows that when he returns to his dorm, some surfaces will be debauched, especially since he’s well aware he’s specifically vacating the dorm for that very debauchery to take place, and even more so by Tamaki, of all people. The short navy tentacles at the sides of his face nearly get singed by how hot his blush flares just acknowledging that while Izuku is out, he’ll _know, _and it takes a decent amount of willpower to set the embarrassment aside and allow himself to focus on what’s in front of him—Mirio, sliding the balcony door back open and leaning against the frame, running a hand through his hair and glancing at him in a way that conveys a nervous tension Tamaki recognizes, but Mirio wears it so, so well. When that same brand of anticipatory jitters runs through Tamaki, it’s like a weight pressing down on his insides whose stubborn inertia Tamaki must force himself against until it budges—and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes he isn’t strong enough to overcome it, because an apprehension that makes taking any given plunge difficult for fear of failure or embarrassment is a heavy weight to shift, indeed. But on Mirio, it vibrates like electricity, like fuel, energy, like an eagerness to rise to a challenge, excitement in spite of the unpredictability, or perhaps because of it, since uncertainty leaves open the possibility for things to go well. 

Much to his surprise, however, what Tamaki’s feeling isn’t that unmistakable fear of what’s to come. Far from it. There’s no hesitance, no indecisiveness urging him to wait or turn back, and in fact when Mirio grins and informs Tamaki that the place is theirs and gestures for him to come back inside, the racket of his heart in his ears only spurs him forward, only makes him eager to continue. Something about Mirio’s absolutely alien composition paired with his towering height, how he takes up triple the space of Tamaki and gives off ten times the energy…It’s terrifying—alluring, captivating, unknowable in a way that would normally leave Tamaki’s insides knotted and his mind a forsaken fog, and the fact that that’s not the case with Mirio is somehow more nerve-wracking, more difficult to understand, more cause for tension. The fact that Tamaki unreservedly, unquestionably wants what’s coming to him is a new breed of bold decisiveness…and this, he doesn’t know what to do with. This is a side of himself he doesn’t know how to direct forward toward his goal, toward Mirio, toward a nebulous idea of intimacy he can’t fully picture or map because he has no reference for what’s under Mirio’s clothes, but wanting to be there in the uncertainty of that future, anyway. He’d wrangled it for a moment—months of pining finally coming to a head as he found himself trapped between Mirio’s chest and the wall, biting at Mirio’s lip with a commanding fervor that dragged new sounds from Mirio that sent jolts down Tamaki’s spine—but this new, slippery, ephemeral feeling had cooled while Mirio had been inside, and Tamaki doesn’t know where any footholdsin it might be to reignite that authoritative confidence that had thrummed through him like thunder on the balcony. 

“M-Mirio,” He begins, eyes on his hands. 

“Yeah?” He senses Mirio glance over his shoulder as he softly slides the balcony door shut.

“I…don’t know how to start,” 

He hears a chuckle, chipper in its pitch but dark and rough at the edges. 

“Gosh, I think that’s the opposite of a problem, Tamaki,” 

He flicks his gaze up.

“It is?”

“Yeah,” Mirio takes a slow pace forward. “It means we can start literally anywhere,” 

Tamaki bristles, feeling a blush cross his features as Mirio finishes closing the distance between them, bending a little at the knees and scooping Tamaki up in one arm, then pacing the six or seven lengths across the living area of the dorm to one of the segments of the wall that slides aside like a shoji door. What’s behind it is little more than a sleep capsule—space enough for a bed up against one wall and a door in the opposite one that supposedly leads to a closet, and a paltry few feet of walkway between them, punctuated by a bedside drawer.

“I know it’s a little cramped, sorry that it’s basically this or the couch. I let Izzy have the bigger room and I’m sorta regretting letting it go to him, now,” Mirio says with a light laugh, at once letting Tamaki slide through his grasp onto the bed and kneeling at the foot of it, sitting back on his heels to put himself on eye level with the Octoling perched on the comforter. To account for Mirio’s size, his bed is double the dimensions of Tamaki’s, and therefore its surface alone is already more room than Tamaki would ever need for today. He feels Mirio’s broad hands rest at his hips and give a gentle but not ambivalent squeeze, and it draws a gulp from Tamaki. He’s not nervous but he’s definitely unsure of what to do now, and apparently it’s easily readable in his expression as the carnivorous glint in Mirio’s eyes softens. 

“You need a sec?” Mirio murmurs. “I figured this, you know, you and me, here, doing, well…” His voice trails off, a finger tick-tocking between himself and Tamaki. “I expected it could be pretty unintuitive…do you wanna talk for a minute, maybe? Do you have, like, any questions for me?” 

Tamaki gulps and thinks, chewing his lip, eyes scanning back and forth before mustering up the courage to voice the question he first composed months ago back on the Metro. 

“Do…you…have like…insides, or…?” Mirio cocks a brow and Tamaki immediately drops his gaze to his hands. “Sorry, sorry. Weird question,” The tips of his ears burn, and he’s searching his mind for a way to rephrase, but as he does so Mirio removes his hands from Tamaki’s hips and he hears a shuffle, and a red polo finds its way into his periphery, pooling on the floor. 

“You wanna see for yourself?” 

He shyly lifts his head, peeking through his bangs and swallowing back a reverent gasp. In this light, Mirio’s near-invisible flesh seems much more solid and tangible as it glows faintly blue, but it also lends a harsh contrasting backdrop for the pink pseudo-spine and branching nerves suspended within it, which Tamaki thinks he can ever so faintly see light with electricity, dispersing outward like lightning in steady, dizzyingly quick pulses. His arms, as far as Tamaki can tell, are wholly without any inner workings aside from the spiderwebbing of nerves that are only perceivable now as tiny glowing threads, and clinging to his ribs on each side are what look like vestigial dorsal fins, but they add a graceful shape to where his torso slims out and disappears into the jeans he’s still wearing. Despite not having any apparent circulatory system (or blood to be carried through it), his torso has a heart in the middle, rounded and fluttering, a little to the left and slightly obscured by the surrounding pinkish tissue that wraps around whatever is holding together his nervous system.

On the Metro, with its fluorescent lighting and dingy colors, Mirio looked like a ghost: spectral, insubstantial. Here, in his element and glowing with the atmospheric blacklight of the Deepsea, his body is more like an ecosystem of phosphorous and sparks, unearthly and breathtaking. 

“Wow…” Tamaki breathes, quite without meaning to, and he’s enamored even further when he finds that Mirio’s blush, along with the rest of his color pallet, has its full saturation, listing red over his cheeks rather than the dull grey-blue he’d witnessed on the train. 

“Heh. Ya sure know how to make a guy feel flattered,” 

Tamaki swallows, torn between staring with intensity concentrated enough to slake his thirst to marvel at the beauty in front of him and glancing away as a show of common courtesy. Surely Mirio knows he’s being studied, and the inside of him is even more minimalistic than Tamaki was expecting, which only raises more questions. He chews his tongue for a moment, thinking again about how his concept of how this encounter would go is terribly vague due to his lack of insight into how Mirio is composed. He has teeth and a heart, but no discernible lungs or stomach, no clear way he’s converting anything that he intakes into energy. Tamaki exhales slowly, searching for a delicate way to phrase the question he has on deck while still very much hypnotized by the steady fluttering of Mirio’s heart. 

“Do you…ever…eat?”

“Is that an invitation?” Mirio’s dark tone and sudden predatory angling of his head yank Tamaki out of his entrancement and he feels his throat close around where his heart lodged itself. Mirio sits forward to stand on his knees, raising his eye level a few inches above Tamaki’s with a hungry air about him, cupping Tamaki’s cheek in his enormous translucent palm and angling his head up to meet his glittery, phantasmal gaze, smirking as he says, “You wanna show me what’s on the menu?”

Tamaki’s insides melt with the speed and force of flash paper held to a flame, and he’s dizzy and uncoordinated as he clutches Mirio’s face in one hand to drag him down for a kiss and claws at his own clothing with the other, yanking his zipper open and peeling his shoulders out of the black material with a fervor and decisiveness that makes his breath catch. He could have gotten undressed much faster had he just paused his kissing for a few moments, but he’s waited this long to taste Mirio again, and even if he’s just being stubborn about it, he doesn’t intend to miss any more opportunities to do so. Mirio finally pulls away and breaks the kiss himself when he notices Tamaki struggling through their heated exchange to kick his pants and underclothes off over his shoes, much to Tamaki’s feverish embarrassment. Mirio chuckles breathlessly and grips Tamaki’s waistband in one hand, yanking away the pants and boxers like a rip cord clean over his shoes, tossing the bundle behind him and drawing a thirsty whine from Tamaki. His eyes slide over the new expanse of skin and Tamaki can’t help but watch Mirio’s heart—perhaps one as telltale as they could come—and delight in the quickened pulse as he takes in what Tamaki’s offering up. 

“So…tell me about _this,”_ Mirio murmurs, somehow at once sultry and debonair as he runs a thumb over the slick, dark blue, prehensile appendage at Tamaki’s groin. “It’s got _suckers, _how kinky,” 

Tamaki lets out a breathless, high-pitched chuckle, punctuated by a gasp as Mirio’s thumb continues traveling in curious concentric circles. 

“I-It comes standard with Octoling boys, hah,” 

“Nothin’ standard about you, Tamaki,” Mirio flashes his teeth.

“Hah, f-flirt, you’ll make me blush,” 

“I certainly hope so,” Mirio smirks and delicately closes his fingers around the slippery length in his hand, palm broad enough to cover all except the flushed tip. Between shaking breaths, Tamaki watches Mirio’s eyes sparkle as the unattended few centimeters lovingly curl toward the contact, finding purchase along the back of his hand and anchoring itself to his skin with any available suckers. Tamaki hears Mirio gulp and exhale slowly before he asks, “Are _you _doing that?” 

“U-Um, it’s involuntary, but I can focus and make it stop if you w—”

“No no no, no don’t you worry, I’m super into it. It likes me,” His grin lists darker before leaning forward and planting a firm kiss at the defenseless flesh in the pocket of Tamaki’s hip, followed by another, another, trailing across Tamaki’s abdomen closer to where his palm is gently wrapped around the quickly darkening appendage, then opening his hand and pressing his tongue down onto the dark blue, viscous tissue. Immediately Tamaki’s body reacts, the suckers releasing their hold on Mirio’s palm in favor of curling toward the preferable sensation. As he lifts his head with a soft chuckle, it stretches up longingly toward Mirio’s mouth, and his eyes flick between the wavering tip of the tentacle and Tamaki’s flushed face. 

“Would it be completely off-color to make a takoyaki joke?”

Tamaki swallows, fighting both to speak through the feverish flutter in his diaphragm and to get his bearings in the wake of Mirio’s blindsiding comment.

“Is…that actually how I taste?”

“Nah, kidding” Mirio laughs in full and the sound is inviting and melodic and Tamaki finds a warm bubble filling up the space in his chest that lust isn’t occupying. “Really can’t say for sure what it’s like. At least,” His voice darkens and he dips his head a fraction. “…not with how little a taste that was. Think I need more of a mouthful to really get a good idea,”

Tamaki’s entire body stiffens as a blush paints his features.

“W-What about you, though?”

“We’ll get to me. I wanna make you feel good first—though I’m a little out of my depth with this tenta-dick you’re rocking, so if, you know, mouth stuff does it for you then let’s do that, but if not, tell me what does. Please, Tamaki,”

The way Mirio’s pitch dips when he says “please” sinks straight through Tamaki’s abdomen, and his tentadick—as Mirio had lovingly coined it—gives a telltale twitch in Mirio’s direction. He swallows and says around a shuddering exhale,

“M-Mouth stuff…y-yeah, mouth stuff is good, but what happens is…the suckers, they…that is, i-inside, it’ll latch onto the insi—”

Mirio’s eyes flutter and he physically licks his lips through a sharp, enamored inhale, and it’s enough to make the rest of Tamaki’s sentence peter out and die in his mouth. 

“Damn, didn’t think you could talk so dirty, Tamaki,” He says, tone hinting at nonchalance, but Tamaki can hear the excitable waver in the words and he cautiously entertains the sense that Mirio urgently wants to indulge in the experience of Tamaki fastening himself to the inside of his throat. 

“You…do you want—”

“I’ll beg if that’s what you need to hear,”

Tamaki swallows down the thrill that runs through him. 

“I-If you can’t breathe…”

“I trust ya to pull the plug. Any amateur can get hickeys _on _their throat, but what do they know about hickeys _in _their throat?”

Tamaki gives a weak chuckle against the flutter in his diaphragm. The shivers running through his blood have been compounding in the unattended tentacle between them, navy flushed nearly to black and beginning to agitatedly flick upward, knowing where relief is hidden—somewhere in the middle of Mirio’s throat. 

“…Okay,”

Mirio grins breathlessly, leaning forward to press a quick kiss to Tamaki’s lips, reassurance mixed with gratitude mixed with unbearable anticipation, before sliding his hands from Tamaki’s sides down to his hips, pace matched with his mouth as he kisses down his torso. Mirio’s hands, though seemingly empty on the inside, are surprisingly unforgiving as he digs his fingers into Tamaki’s backside and scoops him forward and up toward his mouth, and Tamaki’s met with an inescapable, decided firmness from both sides as Mirio at once sinks his mouth around his fidgety dick and pushes Tamaki from behind hard down his throat. 

Immediately Tamaki feels the relief of being enveloped by something wet and at least semi-warm wash over him, but it’s only momentary, because it’s quickly replaced by yet more feverish need as Mirio rubs his tongue between rows of suckers and the hungry reflex to anchor himself inside him becomes uncontrollable. Already swollen to the point of turning black, the appendage robs his brain of somehow more blood and surges down Mirio’s throat, suckers gripping and expanding and searching out space to fill and Mirio makes a sound that Tamaki wants to hear again and again and again and he finds his fingers winding into Mirio’s hair just to hold on_. _It’s all Mirio can seem to do to just keep swallowing around the invasive thing in his throat, the way it’s suctioned to his tongue making his range of motion a little limited, making his breaths hard to steal around it, but he doesn’t indicate that he needs Tamaki to wrench it back under control, so Tamaki exhales and lets his head tilt back, lets his legs stretch out, lets his toes twitch inside the shoes he’s still wearing as Mirio devours him. 

He distantly notes that at one point, one of Mirio’s hands disappears from where it’s been pushing Tamaki harder against his mouth, but he can hardly spare it even that one thought when it’s all he can do to keep his whimpers and choked half-sentences from crossing into a decibel range that’ll pierce the dorm walls as Mirio goes down on him with a kind of interspecies zeal Tamaki was hoping for but dared not expect. When he’s brave enough to glance down, several things make another jolt of arousal throttle through him—first, that he can see through the thin tissue of Mirio’s cheeks to where he’s anchored down his throat, where it disappears deeper into his inner workings, the compounded pink of Mirio’s components making it too opaque to see further. Watching the vibrant blue tissue of Mirio’s insides contract around him as he’s granted the heady rush of endorphins with each loving slurp is the single lewdest thing he’s ever experienced, and this puts a weird twist in his guts that would usually have him shrinking into the wall, but he’s too far gone, too caught up in chasing the shivery sensation branching out inside him from the dick up to worry about being embarrassed now. 

Second is his answer to why Mirio is only gripping at Tamaki’s flesh with one hand now—the other is shoved deep down the front of his jeans, belt unbuckled but button apparently too tricky to undo with one hand. Tamaki distantly suspects that Mirio would have preferred to have the range of motion granted by freeing himself from the denim prison entirely, but when the button proved too stubborn for one hand and sparing his other would mean he couldn’t keep Tamaki as boxed in down his throat as he is, opted instead to keep giving exemplary head over better attending himself—and this thought makes Tamaki’s heart stutter dangerously, and his sudden burst of affection in the middle of an otherwise lustful concoction of feelings somehow adds to how hot everything is and spurs him closer to peaking. 

“M-Mirio,” The words are achingly difficult to form and link together cohesively, but he has to warn him. “It’s…it’s really close to the point where I c-can’t detach, even if I try to…if you’d rather do s-something else, then I’m—!” 

Interjecting with a muffled chuckle, Mirio slips his other hand from his jeans to rejoin the first underneath Tamaki, dragging him forward and throwing his thighs far enough over his shoulders that Tamaki reflexively digs his heels into Mirio’s back before he’s scooped clean off the bed and lifted in a shamelessly explicit fashion onto Mirio’s shoulders, his mouth never once faltering in its attentiveness. He gasps out, shocked a few paces back from orgasm as Mirio sits back on his heels and puppeteers him to be precariously straddled around his face,Tamaki’s only balance being the broad palms cupping him like a bowl of water brought to the lips of a person dying of thirst—and drinking indeed like life depended on it. 

Helpless, with no leverage to squirm away or even the last dregs of coherence needed to worry about Mirio drowning in him as his small, involuntary struggles prove futile, it’s all he can do to arch in Mirio’s grasp, both hands pressed hard against his mouth as his legs lock behind Mirio’s neck, and as his eyes flutter and the ceiling blurs, the suckers on the tentacle suctioned to Mirio’s tongue redouble their grip wholly of their own accord. Distantly he hears Mirio make a short, startled sound as the suddenly viciously predatory thing in his mouth gathers up divots of his tongue with enough force to bruise and surges somehow further down his throat as it seeks out any remaining crevices to fill with a purposefulness Tamaki has no agency over. He’s whimpering wordlessly into his hands and he feels like he’s draining from the top down, strung taught in Mirio’s grasp as the sensation rolls through him to where Mirio is perched. With a sob and a choked approximation of Mirio’s name, there’s a rush and everything that had been draining down pours out of him and into a hurriedly swallowing Mirio—swallowing is really the only option open to him as the suckers in his mouth unyieldingly grip through waves of orgasm that Tamaki couldn’t count if he wanted to, and only when he’s a numb, quaking mess nearly melting through Mirio’s fingers does the suction relent and he distantly senses Mirio pull away and gasp for air. 

He’s deposited back onto the bed, sliding from Mirio’s shoulders and letting out a swift exhale when his fluttering diaphragm proves unable to negate the soft impact against his laboring lungs. It doesn’t help his general breathlessness when he’s suddenly pinned as Mirio slumps forward over him.

“Do…do you always run so _hot?”_

Tamaki blinks and manages to locate Mirio’s face, perched at his belly button, lips and insides of his mouth visibly stained darker, either from the bruises his tentadick left behind or the purple remains of what Mirio couldn’t swallow or both. It flips Tamaki’s spent libido quickly back to attention, but he’s still dizzy and still unsure what Mirio had said to him. 

“Wh-What?”

“How do your balls not boil?”

Tamaki shakes his head, somehow less sure of the line of discussion than he was before asking Mirio to clarify.

“I…_what?” _

Mirio snorts a little and coyly tilts his head at Tamaki’s navel, wiping purple slick from his mouth on the back of his hand.

“Your cum’s hot. Like, really, _really _hot. I was ready to have my tongue in a vice but damn, you didn’t warn me about the volcanic vent I was about to be chugging like a gatorade,” 

Tamaki can’t summon more than a stare for a few breaths. 

“I’m…just…_me _temperature. Octoling temperature, I, uh,” He chews his lip for a moment, managing to draw a line between two dots in his post-orgasm haze. “You’re a Denizen of the Deep, you know. It’s not that I’m overheated, it’s that _you’re_ like sorta…tepid?”

Mirio chuckles. 

“And here I thought we were doing a good job navigating through however many ocean zones are between us. S’pose I can’t give you grief for not warning me the octopus egg soup would be hot since it looks like taking different body temps into consideration slipped both our minds,”

“I…guess it did…wait, _what_ did you call it?”

Mirio grins. 

“Am I that far off base?”

“I’m…yes, yes you are far off base,” 

“Well what did I just drink?”

Tamaki flushes and glances away from Mirio’s half-glazed, glittery eyes. 

“Don’t…don’t make me go into detail,”

“Aw, but how else are we gonna bridge the divide between our species if we can’t talk frankly about that kind of thing?”

“You just _swallowed _so I think that’s a more sturdy bridge than any discussion could build,”

“It’s ink isn’t it?”

Tamaki jerks his gaze back to Mirio’s, embarrassment filling his stomach. 

“I—I-I mean, well…_sorta,”_

“I knew it!” Mirio chuckles. “I just won a bet with Izzy,”

“You were _making bets _about this?” Tamaki’s pitch is listing toward mortified. 

“Well, this, yes, but _right now_ this, not specifically, no. And he didn’t even wanna wonder with me about what you might be rocking below the belt, so it was less a bet and more me just wanting to get under his skin a little by not shutting up about it at any point. So all told, I had more than a few ideas I’d come up with to toss his way, so since one of ‘em was right I can have fun rubbing it in his face later,”

Mirio’s grin is devilish. Tamaki shakes his head, wits just about gathered. 

“Okay, well…putting _that_ aside—and also please don’t talk to him about, you know, _me. This. _How _this_ works—you’re still not entirely right…it’s…just, you know, ink is from the same kind of…” He screws up his mouth and buries his face in his hands, flopping his head back onto the mattress. “…the same…kind of…organ,” 

“You guys having jizz fights up on the surface?”

“_No, _ink and jizz are two completely different things, they just _happen _to be really similar in like, color and consistency and stuff, please can we do literally anything else other than keep talking about this,” 

“Haha!…Well, instead, do you wanna talk about where I can fit inside _you?_” 

Mirio’s joking tone pivots sharply into something darker that makes Tamaki’s insides drop like he’d just leapt from a building, the cooling blush reigniting over his skin as he peeks through his fingers down to where Mirio’s face is still resting on his stomach. He gulps. 

“Y-Yes,” 

Mirio grins slyly, lifting his weight from his folded legs under him and leaning over Tamaki, knees still on the floor but covering so much more space than Tamaki that he easily levels their gazes. As he stretches his torso over the bed and rests his weight on his forearms at Tamaki’s sides, his semi-exposed heart again comes into Tamaki’s line of sight as his dense chest weighs down Tamaki’s middle, hands instinctively reaching to press against the translucent flesh and watching in lovestruck awe as Mirio’s skin gives under the touch.

“Wanna see what you’ve got to work with?”

Tamaki hardly hears him, far too caught up in being pushed up against Mirio’s chest, fingers sinking just a fraction into the gelatin-like flesh and reflecting the glow along the curvature of his knuckles, the distance between his hands and Mirio’s thrumming heart quantifiable to the centimeter at a glance. 

“Tamaki?”

“Y-Yes,” He swallows, wrenching his gaze away from Mirio’s heart but finding himself equally captivated by his luminous blue eyes, and he finds his mouth uncooperative. “I’d…I want to. To, you know, talking and seeing. Yes to both. Two yesses,” He stutters out, flush redoubling through his features.

“Funny you should say two,”

“What?”

“You’ll see in a second here,” 

Mirio smirks and presses a kiss to Tamaki’s mouth before leveraging his weight off his small torso and standing from where he’d been kneeling at the edge of the bed. Tamaki blushes as he’s faced with Mirio towering at his full height over him, naked and sexed up on his blankets, and despite what he’s known about himself to this point—confident that this particular set of situational components would normally make him die of embarrassment—he’s surprised to find that certain urgency still prevailing over the anxiety. The exposure and the intimacy and feeling very, very small and vulnerable only stir up more of the unfamiliar greedy thirst in his insides, only make him want more desperately whatever mysterious thing is coming to him as Mirio finishes prying himself out of his over-tight jeans. Tamaki exhales sharply as his eyes fall to the newly exposed expanse of Mirio’s body.

Like the rest of him, what Mirio’s sporting under his jockstrap (He was wearing a jockstrap this whole time? Tamaki makes a note to ask if he’d be willing to wear that by itself sometime) is translucent, nerves lighting down the attentive shaft and outward from a pink center, clustering to become noticeably more bright toward the twin heads perched on the end of it, where small fins not unlike minute versions of those clinging to his ribs give a yellow corona to the glowing blue tip…or tips. Tamaki gulps, recalling the intrusive thought he’d had months prior about Mirio’s pubic hair, confirmed for him now that yes, the carpet matches the drapes. He swallows and ventures a cautious smirk.

“…Oh that’s what you meant,” 

“It comes standard with Sea Angel boys,” Mirio chuckles, mirroring Tamaki’s words from earlier. “Whatcha think?”

Mirio’s tone is sunny and chipper and Tamaki marvels at how easily he can just slide into any situation, even ones like this, a first time to end all first times: showing his double-header to someone outside his species in the hopes that it strikes Tamaki’s fancy. 

It does. 

“Light up my insides,”

Mirio’s eyes widen and he gulps, physically taking a step back, and frankly Tamaki is shocked at his own commanding candor as well, but the day’s alien driving force of unconditional want far eclipses the knee-jerk reaction at the periphery of his brain begging him to backtrack or hide his face. Instead he doesn’t even blink. Instead he digs into that fleeting foothold in this decisive demeanor he’d briefly found on the balcony before it has the chance to elude him again. Instead he dips his chin and sizes up what Mirio’s offering, leaning back and folding his arms behind his head in a lustful, confident fashion he’d only ever seen done in works of fiction and displaying shamelessly the way the tentacle at the joinder of his legs is heavily seeping a purplish, viscous fluid from its whole length—but it does the trick. He can tell because he watches the nerves pulsing through Mirio’s torso flicker and redouble the signals at the twin heads brandished toward Tamaki, tiny, tiny sparks compounded and clustered enough to make the blue glow of his flesh waver hypnotically along the shaft like a lure—and hypnotically lured, he is.

Mirio moves forward then with a purposefulness that makes Tamaki’s insides leap toward his mouth. He’s scooped easily into Mirio’s arms and swung into his lap in the same movement, finding himself straddling Mirio’s thighs as he takes up the place on the bed Tamaki had just vacated and leans his back against the wall. His hips are pushed roughly up against Mirio’s and Tamaki’s heart clatters around in his chest as he feels the appendages of both parties involved sandwiched together between their abdomens. 

Tamaki’s in particular wastes no time. Reawakening quickly and becoming slicker by the moment, it moves toward the stimulation and Mirio withers under him as the tentacle wraps once around the new target and knowingly slips the prehensile tip into the tiny gap between heads, the suckers gripping in a much more forgiving fashion, but still decidedly anchored. Mirio’s breath is ragged at the edges, the phosphorescent flush across his expression burning in Tamaki’s insides, and he laments the words he’s about to say—but objectively this is a misuse of a tentadick’s intended purpose, and Mirio is dangerously ensnared in something that’s already bruised him once. 

“I…probably shouldn’t keep this here for long,”

“Aw,” Mirio chuckles breathlessly, “What that dick do, though?” 

Tamaki snorts.

“You know already. I don’t want to be stuck to you here. Well…I _do_, but it’s probably not gonna feel very good for you. It’ll probably, you know, actually really hurt you. Unless your junk is less sensitive than your mouth,”

Mirio swallows.

“Guess you’re right…so…how do we do this?” 

His voice is rougher than it’s been this whole encounter and Tamaki’s insides again make to escape his skin through his mouth, and somehow he manages to head off at the pass his heart leaping into his throat with a taught chuckle. 

“Good thing for you I’m so gay,” 

Mirio exhales weakly, understanding sparking through his scleras and hands flexing at Tamaki’s hips, managing to laugh through whatever feeling is pulling his voice tight as he says,

“…I’d posit that you being so gay is probably a much better thing for _you,_ right now, you know, considering…” He chews his lip. “…the…size,” 

Tamaki’s grin is sharp and feels foreign on his face, but he’s spent so long drowning in apprehension and anxiety that this sensation of certainty is easy to isolate, and all that remains to do is follow it toward what every layer of him wants, the desire and focus and drive inside him like a lifeline through his brain—and Mirio is at the other end, Mirio’s _everything _is at the other end. 

“You’re right,” He does something he’s never done with anyone and rolls his hips in Mirio’s hands, pressing and rubbing the mess of sexual organs together and against both their abdomens and the expression this yields across Mirio’s features grips Tamaki by the lungs and it’s with a breathless fervor and a rasp in his voice that he finishes, “Let’s see if that pays off and I can take it,”

Mirio’s mouth falls open at his words and Tamaki watches where the signals to his nerves start to compound enough to light. The flickering that’s illuminating in thrumming waves where Tamaki’s corresponding organ is wrapped around begins to replicate in other extremities, and Tamaki’s hard pressed to tear his gaze away from where strobing pulses of light waver through Mirio’s abdomen and throat, smaller ringlets zipping dizzyingly quickly through his fingers along where the nerves are clustered. Tamaki smirks. 

“Does that mean you’re turned on?” 

Mirio’s response is to crush a kiss to Tamaki’s lips, hand slipping from where its been resting at Tamaki’s waist to wrap a broad palm over where they’re entwined, sliding up the incongruously interlocked shapes and collecting dark, viscous fluid in a thick, lewd layer on his fingers. Tamaki shudders into Mirio’s mouth at the contact and is about to break the kiss to pose a question about readying himself for Mirio, but he doesn’t get the chance as he feels him jump the gun and push resolutely firmly what must be at least two slick-coated fingers into the orifice in question. Tamaki rears forward and gasps against Mirio’s mouth, body resisting the invasion even as he’s craving the touch, and the latter feeling directs the tentacle between them to involuntarily constrict. 

Mirio jerks his mouth away with a hiss and Tamaki immediately tries to pull back but, fastened as he is to Mirio, only succeeds in pushing backward and deeper onto Mirio’s fingers. He wilts around the sensation despite the sudden jolt of anxiety in his guts, and has to struggle to speak.

“M-Mirio, wait! Wait, let m-me—” He can’t choke any more words out, but Mirio mercifully relents, drawing his hand away and allowing Tamaki to find a heading for his focus and will himself to detach, resting his forehead where Mirio’s collarbone would be. There’s something carnal in him that fights him at every soft, wet pop of a sucker coming loose, to the point where he’s letting out a quiet, pained whine, desperately wanting to keep himself anchored to Mirio and struggling to overcome the instinct to do so, even as peeling himself away reveals tiny circular marks coiling up Mirio’s shaft that stab guilt into his heart.

“I’m s-sorry,” Tamaki manages through a gasp, prying the last sucker off of Mirio’s tender flesh and lifting his gaze. 

“No, no, don’t apologize, you warned me that would happen, I just got over-eager,” He chuckles weakly, glancing down to where the tentacle between them is agitatedly curling in on itself. After a gulp and a shaky exhale, he says, “Does it need something to hold onto?”

“Um…ideally,” Tamaki blushes something fierce. “Or something I can put it into. I can, you know, um,” He chews his lip and glances away. “…f-finish without being anchored, but it kind of feels hollow. I was thinking once…you w-w-were…i-inside…I-I’d just fasten, like, here,” He shakily runs a finger down Mirio’s abdomen where his belly button would be. “Though it wouldn’t be a whole lot of stimulation, it would still take the edge off and I could, you know…enjoy it all the way,” 

“Well, do, uh…” Mirio pauses. Tamaki’s face is burning, foothold in that commanding demeanor slipping once more, but Mirio’s uncertain tone spurs him to glance up and meet his gaze again, sensing he’s not alone in the sudden shyness. “Do…toys…do anything for ya?” 

Tamaki swallows and exhales, cautiously asking,

“…What do you have?” 

With Tamaki still in his lap, Mirio stretches to the side and with one hand roughly pulls open his bedside drawer, scrabbling around blindly in its contents for a moment before bringing into view something silicone, black, and sized to fill a Sea Angel. 

“Good thing for you I’m so gay,” Mirio flashes his teeth. “Wouldn’t be its intended purpose, but uh,” He shifts the cylinder in his hand and presses his thumb into an embossed button on the flat of it, and the buzz that fills Tamaki’s ears has his face reddening somehow further. Mirio grins shyly and finishes, “It’s got a remote too if you wanna get like extra kinky about it. You think if you give this to your junk to play with, it’ll do the trick?” 

Tamaki gulps.

“That’s the size of my forearm,”

“Want something smaller?” Mirio leans over and shuffles around in the drawer again. “Oh, here’s the remote. Hope the batteries are still good. But um, I don’t actually think I have anything smaller than this—”

“N-No, no, I, um,” Tamaki stutters, flustered and trying not to let Mirio misconstrue his comment further, and buries his burning face in his hands. “If it’s just to anchor onto, the size is fine. It’s fine, it’s just—I’m just a little, you know, embarrassed that I put your dick in a vice, and I probably should have specified before we got to this point that I’d like something to fasten onto when we’re, you know, doing _you _stuff, and…y-you’re not sore or anything? From the s-suckers…”

Mirio cocks a brow. 

“Even if I were, you think that’d stop me?”

“I-I just…I just can’t shake feeling like I ruined this,”

“You didn’t ruin this,” Mirio chuckles gently, the softening of his tone lending itself to a little bravery, and Tamaki manages to peek through his fingers to meet his gaze as he continues, “There aren’t rules for this kind of thing. I just wanna see what happens, and so far nothing that’s happened would make me call the whole thing off or even slow me down. Unless you say you’re not feeling it, but is that just because you’re feeling guilty about sorta pinching me?”

Tamaki winces, still trying to navigate between thinking straight and manically lusting.

“…Y-Yeah,”

“Well, check it, the marks are already gone,” Tamaki glances to where Mirio’s hard-on is still stalwartly standing between them, confirming that yes, the coil of little circles has already faded. “Takes a lot to really bruise a Sea Angel when we’re so squishy,” 

Tamaki lets out a tense chuckle, and even though his insides are being pulled any number of ways by nerves and guilt, Mirio is quickly eroding away at his hesitance. Gulping, he stutters,

“Well…if it’s really okay…s-so…I guess…where were we? It’s just, I—!”

Tamaki’s voice comes to an abrupt, choking stop as he feels Mirio press the toy against the tentacle’s suckered underside. Immediately it responds and greedily wraps itself around the vibrating silicone, anchoring decisively swiftly as Tamaki lets out a startled vocalization before his mind goes numb at the edges and his voice peters out into a whimper. 

“I think you were telling me that this would do the trick,” 

There’s a purr in Mirio’s voice that yanks at Tamaki’s insides, and the steady, soft hum of the toy makes an unannounced transition into pulses, forcing a new sound from Tamaki—shock mixed with arousal—and through the stutter in his thoughts, he manages to isolate the little black remote in Mirio’s hand. Mirio lets out a long, enamored sigh, just _watching _Tamaki squirm and shudder in his lap, and he feels a hand slipping around the curvature of his hips to where it had last been exploring. Distantly he hears Mirio digging around in the bedside drawer again, and somehow through the flustered arousal he manages to put two and two together when he feels a cold, viscous liquid all-but dousing his lower back and sliding into the valley where Mirio’s other hand is waiting to pounce.

There’s a hitch in Mirio’s breath as he says, “Looks like it does,” and easily slides a finger back into him.

Tamaki’s palms reflexively shoot away from his face to brace against Mirio’s chest, shuddering around the Sea Angel’s touch. Setting the remote aside somewhere, Mirio softly cups Tamaki’s chin and gently tilts his head back, and he finds his gaze leveled with Mirio’s, otherworldly and inescapable, helpless to stop his reactions from tracking across his face like a marquee for Mirio to interpret as his fingers knowingly input commands into him, all the while enduring the buzzing from the toy, tentacle autonomously clutching it tighter by the moment.

“Gosh, you’re cute,” Mirio murmurs lovingly, slyly, adding a second finger. Third? In the hazy space between embarrassment and arousal, all Tamaki can summon is a breathless, high-pitched sound, punctuated by a moan that winds through an entire octave. Mirio grins. “Think you’re ready?” 

“I-I…uh…” Tamaki is wracked with shivers, and he’s not sure how much is from unbearably concentrated stimulation and how much is from nervous embarrassment. He’s hiccuping and letting his mouth fall open around moans and Mirio’s hand at his chin is allowing him no room to clutch at so much as a modicum of modesty. Despite the relentless pleasure derived from the toy still nudging him closer to a second climax, holding this intense eye contact through his downright slutty display is just making his body wind up like a spring and actively fight Mirio in his efforts to loosen him up.

“It’s just…y-you’re making me look at you, and…and it’s embarrassing,”

He has to choke the words out around dual obstructions, sheer need paired with cloying chagrin. The fingers tipping back Tamaki’s chin slide away and his whole body slumps a little as the vibrations from the toy dial back to stillness. He lets out a sound somewhere between relief and desperation, and now that the buzzing isn’t filling the air, his heavy, salacious breaths are loud in his ears. Mirio withdraws his fingers, leaving a hollow feeling behind that Tamaki knows should feel much _more_ so in order to be indicative of his ability to accommodate Mirio, and he bites back another stab of guilt, cursing the tension that’s a product of unwelcome nerves. 

“Tamaki, I wish you could see the faces you’re making,”

Tamaki withers deeper into Mirio’s lap and brings his hands up once more to hide his face.

“I-It’s—”

“It’s sexy. I’m in _agony_ just watching how you react. I’m not even jerking off to you, and that face you make, just,” He draws his lip between his teeth. “…Just really makes it hard not to,” 

Tamaki feels a searing blush eclipse the one already on his features and he manages to peek through his fingers.

“…You…you like watching me that much?”

“God, yes. Honestly I’ve never been more turned on in my life. But,” He flicks his eyes away. “If you’re embarrassed when I look, then I guess I can—”

“You…can look,” Tamaki swallows and searches around inside himself for that confidence—that fearlessness that’s been eluding him again since he had to bring everything to a screeching halt to pry their dicks apart—as Mirio’s confession that Tamaki is bringing him to new depths of arousal gives him a leg back up. 

Mirio gulps. 

“…_Just _look?”

There’s a thrill that runs through Tamaki then, and when he opens his mouth to reply, the words have an edge to them that he can grab onto. 

“I’m still too tense, but the toy…it’ll probably make me cum before I’m open enough to take you…so I guess, until I _am_ ready_, _do you, well…wanna…watch?”

Mirio wilts under him and Tamaki holds back a hiccup as he feels fingers at work again, suddenly reminded of their charge. 

“Yeah, that…that sounds so damn hot, but,” There’s a whine to his voice that does something to Tamaki’s stomach, and it’s with brows peaked that he begs, “…but, it’s…I’m…I want you to touch me, Tamaki, _please,” _

It’s the way he says “please”—strained, thin—that puts the smirk back on Tamaki’s face. 

“Turn the toy back on and I will,” 

Mirio blatantly scrambles for the remote. Thumb hovering over the power button, he locks their gazes and runs his tongue over his lip, making it clear to Tamaki that he’s taking him up on the offer of shamelessly watching the curve he rides through an orgasm as he clicks down, sending a jolt up Tamaki’s spine, mind blurring at the edges as the various parts of his body each either stiffen or turn to mush. 

True to his word, he slides a wavering hand from his thigh to curl lightly around Mirio’s branching shaft—nerve endings notably more agitated and alight than minutes prior—and he’s hard pressed to argue with the satisfaction that rolls through him as he watches Mirio’s flush darken, hears the sharp intake of breath at his touch. Though, even as Tamaki runs a thumb down the length of him, Mirio’s hardly forgotten his task at hand, and Tamaki has to bite back a shudder as Mirio ventures what is now _definitely _a third finger. He’ll probably have to get to four, and the thought does something polarizing inside him, though the anxiousness is quickly drowned again as the fuzzy edges of his mind come apart like bad seams in a swath of fabric, letting his thoughts drift apart, letting him live in the fog of pleasure and breathe in and be sustained by only the most immediate stimuli: Mirio’s soft groans as Tamaki dares to use both hands on him, running a fingertip along the frills clinging to the twin heads and marveling at how tiny and soft the six little yellow fins are; Mirio’s heart visibly hammering through the glowing tissue of his chest when Tamaki lets out a shaking breath and experimentally cages his hands around Mirio’s hardened flesh, each palm branching off before slipping back down and together again; the blood singing past Tamaki’s ears as it’s pulled down toward where every other resource is being pulled, toward the oozing purple mess of an organ clutching a dildo and rocketing him toward a second orgasm as Mirio, forehead nearly pressed to Tamaki’s and eyes glazed, coaxes his body to let in digit number four. 

Tamaki feels himself start to arch and tense in Mirio’s lap as the rolling sensation begins to snowball through him, gathering strength and speed as the grip of the suckers again becomes all at once relentless, which only sends the vibrations through him with more intensity, spiraling him to the point of no return.

“M-Mirio, I-I—”

“God, please, Tamaki, _please _cum for me?” 

Far be it from Tamaki to deny Mirio’s request. 

He has enough wits about him to at least move his hands from Mirio’s dick before all control leaves him, fingertips digging into Mirio’s shoulders as his head tilts back, mouth falling open around an incoherent string of pleas as his body spasms and bursts of viscous violet paint Mirio’s abdomen.

His grip on the toy relents and he lets out a weak whimper of relief as it falls to the side and rolls across Mirio’s thigh and onto the bed, leaving a spotted trail of purple like an errant paint roller. 

“S-Sorry for the…the stains, I—”

Mirio swallows the rest of his sentence, pushing their mouths together drunkenly, and Tamaki doesn’t have the focus needed to overthink so he just kisses sloppily back. 

“Will you think it’s gross if I don’t wipe this up?” Mirio says in a rush, breath labored as he pulls away. “I don’t have a towel in here, and I-I—I don’t want to stop,” 

Tamaki manages to shake the blur from his brain long enough to take in Mirio’s expression, and it sends a jolt through his watery blood. There’s sheer, unilateral need written in the solid blue of Mirio’s eyes, intensity bordering on carnivorously feral and unquestionably clear like words printed on a page. Tamaki gulps. 

“…There’s just going to be more of it in a minute, anyway,” 

There’s a grin that’s far more sharp than the ones previously gracing Mirio’s features, and then Tamaki feels Mirio flex the fingers inside him one more time before withdrawing them and leaving an uncomfortable void in him that begs to be rectified—something Mirio is more than in the position to address. 

There are slick, purple fingerprints all over the clear bottle Mirio all-but upends over his hard-on and unceremoniously discards to the floor. Tamaki lets out a breathless chuckle, paired with a coy—and far from spent—smirk.

“Your bedside manner is just crumbling,”

“I-I can’t…I don’t even know how long we’ve been going, and you’re so—I’m so—”

“So turned on you can’t think?”

Mirio whines, and straddling Mirio’s thighs as he is, Tamaki easily feels it when he starts to tremble.

“Tamaki, _please,” _

There it is, the word that effortlessly resets Tamaki’s libido back to starting position. He draws his lip between his teeth and the tentacle between them starts to shift with interest again.

“…I _do_ remember saying light up my insides,” 

In a breath, Tamaki’s scooped easily into Mirio’s hands, grateful that he still has a solid grip on Mirio’s shoulders as he’s lifted up and forward, and Mirio palms him open into a wide yawn that, even with the extensive foreplay and multiple orgasms, makes him wince a little. 

“Y-You’ll tell me if I—if it hurts or…” Mirio stutters out. 

“Mirio,” Tamaki finds that his voice is pulled thin by the same want, and with a kind of enamored impatience, sits back on his heels and takes the reins from Mirio, choosing to skewer himself like the meal he wants Mirio to make of him, pain be damned. 

And regardless, any residual discomfort from being stretched so _wide _to accommodate the double-header quickly evaporates at the _sound _that comes out of Mirio’s mouth, something that Sea Angels wouldn’t seem capable of producing, low and sharp like gravel, incongruous with the spectral composition of his body and bounce of his personality. It sends a shudder through where they’re connected and the tentacle between them is suddenly _very _handsy again. Tamaki fumbles for the toy resting against his shin and still vibrating away, hurriedly pushing it against the tentacle before it can stubbornly anchor to _anything else _and ruin the pace of the evening once more. 

Mirio’s fingers are pressing into Tamaki’s hips, head bent forward and brows peaking as he meets Tamaki’s gaze with eyes drunkenly half-lidded.

“It…You’re s-so hot on the inside, it almos-st burns…”

Tamaki swallows, doing his damndest to breathe evenly.

“Are you okay?"

“Yeah…yeah, I just…I want you so _bad_, everything’s so sensitive, b-but I’m more than okay. Are…you okay? Is it t-too much?”

Tamaki slides his hands from Mirio’s shoulders and cups his face with both palms, breathing shallow as he rasps,

“It’s a lot—but I want all of it,” 

And he crushes his mouth over Mirio’s. The fingers at his hips redouble their grip and press into Tamaki with enough force to bruise and Mirio holds him inescapably firmly in place and grinds up into him, testing Tamaki’s depths before sitting forward and rolling Tamaki under him, never once breaking from Tamaki’s mouth, swallowing down whatever incomprehensible half-formed words come out of it as Mirio finally, _finally, _after months of flushed daydreaming and lonely nights, meets Tamaki in their shared fantasy, borne from amnesia and magic. 

What Mirio had below the belt could have looked like anything, and Tamaki thanks his lucky stars that it’s a form he can fit inside him with a function that draws moans out of him that pour into Mirio’s mouth like it does. It lacks the finesse of a tentacle, but…the _power _behind those strokes_. _With the new source of pleasure introduced, Tamaki has to fumble for the off button on the cylinder of silicone sandwiched between them to silence its vibrations just so he doesn’t get overstimulated in seconds flat, and he manages to do so completely blind, because Mirio isn’t giving Tamaki a moment away from his mouth, kissing him breathless. 

Distantly, Tamaki worries that his nails are digging too sharply, too deeply into Mirio’s shoulders, chest, anywhere he can clutch, but his skin gives as much as it needs to for Tamaki’s bruising grip to go unnoticed, same as Tamaki’s body is in fine form to give around Mirio’s own invasion without pain or distraction from the intensity of the connection. Mirio stubbornly refuses to break his mouth from Tamaki’s until, in an effort to spear himself even more thoroughly onto him, Tamaki rolls his hips up to meet a thrust and the cry that tears from Mirio’s throat forces the kiss to break, and Tamaki tilts his head up to bury his lips into the crook of Mirio’s neck and roll his hips in Mirio’s hands as many consecutive times as his strength will allow so he can hear that sound _again_. 

Intermittently he mouths down Mirio’s jaw and nips at the flesh of his throat, enchanted by the impressions his teeth leave. The give of Mirio’s composition remembers Tamaki’s bite, and the divots his teeth push into his skin seem to catch and gather up the light in him like how the moon’s reflection in a lake is dispersed when the surface is disturbed, making the shallow bite marks striking and substantial in an almost romantic way. 

“I’ll never get tired of your skin,” Tamaki says, breathless and quite without meaning to voice the thought. Mirio lets a frenetic, high-pitched chuckle into Tamaki’s hair and sits back on his heels, pulling Tamaki forward and draping his back across Mirio’s thighs, hair haloed out and hands gripped into the bedclothes as his heels reflexively lock behind Mirio’s back. 

“I’ll never get tired of _all of you_—oh, god,” His grip on Tamaki’s hips stutters as he labors in a choked gasp through the sensations the new position grants him, and the thrill sparked inside Tamaki by the whine in Mirio’s breath alone is enough to topple him past the point of no return, feeling a third orgasm rapidly and steadily descending through him. 

Tamaki wants to crush his lips against Mirio’s when he peaks, wants Mirio to swallow his own name stuttered into his mouth as Tamaki cries out, wants to be held so tightly against Mirio that he can’t so much as wriggle away from the intensity, just endure it in its fullness and leave an impression in Mirio’s skin from where his body lines up against his when he tips over the edge. Tamaki uncurls his fists from the bedclothes and claws his way up Mirio’s thighs, pulling himself up into Mirio’s lap until he can grip into Mirio’s shoulders and press their torsos together, hooking his arms around Mirio’s neck and grabbing at his hair and barely managing to grasp at the dregs of coherence needed before he comes undone to beg Mirio, 

“Hold me,” 

And he pushes his mouth over Mirio’s, swallowing an enamored whine and returning one of his own when Mirio complies and crushes him against his torso, caged and pinned and wholly Mirio’s as he becomes irreversibly anchored once again. 

Mirio unexpectedly bites Tamaki’s lip, and the sensation, though a surprise, is still pleasant in the heat of all this, but there’s a separate and much more startling one forming where Mirio is buried. 

“Tama…” Mirio chokes out, then his eyes roll closed and he bites down into the crook of Tamaki's neck as he feels something absolutely alien burst forward inside him, like suddenly there are many _more _appendages filling him and gripping into his insides and pulling him down harder onto Mirio, sealing him lightning fast and inescapably firmly around the dual heads as Mirio moans _“…kiiiiii,” _into his shoulder and empties himself into Tamaki. 

But the shock of it does not eclipse the pleasure, and especially not in light of the sounds Mirio just made for Tamaki, because of Tamaki, and once he’s anchored to something, it’s out of his hands and he’s cresting this peak come hell or high water. He shakily grabs for Mirio’s cheek, pulling his face from the crook of his neck and formlessly, clumsily shoving their mouths together, welcoming the hazy, startled hiccup Mirio gives that morphs quickly into the kinds of sounds and touches that come from a hunger to see a partner satisfied. The strength in his arms again cages Tamaki decidedly firmly against his torso, grinding up into him even as Tamaki notes how the hypersensitivity tortures him, and it’s these little whimpers of overstimulation that tip Tamaki over the edge of his third orgasm. 

He’s so tightly crushed to Mirio as he cries out into his mouth that it feels like he’s spilling into Mirio’s insides rather than onto his skin, and the heady rush is just compounded more at the twin sensations of being filled to the brim as well as buried and anchored and doing his _own_ filling, and he all-but loses consciousness as the last dregs of viscous purple empty out of him. 

Diaphragm locked as the tremors wrack him, he’s breathing shallowly enough that it prompts Mirio to swallow and ask through labored breaths into his hair,

“You alright?”

Tamaki can’t even identify the words to use in a reply, let alone voice them. Mirio leans forward and Tamaki distantly feels the covers against the back of his head, but he won’t disentangle his arms from around Mirio’s neck to let him lift his body away. 

“Tamaki,” Mirio says with a breathless chuckle. “Come on, I wanna check up on you, let me pull out,” 

It’s all he can do to loosen his grasp, synapses still firing with enough force to render him helpless under the signals from his body, with barely the faculties left to keep breathing enough to keep him from passing out entirely. Mirio slides slowly away from him, and the sensation of Mirio vacating Tamaki’s body is indicative of a shape _wholly _different than the one that had entered him. Blearily, he lifts his head and tries to focus his vision on where the answer might lie, and he doesn’t have enough energy left in him to feel shock at the eldritch likeness Mirio’s now sporting at his groin, the soft little fins around the twin heads having extended an inconceivable length into six predatory-looking tentacles, and though they’re noticeably slowly shrinking away and retracting back into their innocuous teeny yellow corona, they’re still on their own at least half the length of what Tamaki had _thought _was all of Mirio’s dick. 

“Sorry…I shoulda warned you…” Mirio says, blushing and grinning but a little chagrinned. “…It does this,”

Tamaki swallows and shakes his head a little, grasping for any kind of coherence, and he’s surprised when the first feeling he can snatch out of the fog is amusement. Mirio must also be taken aback because when Tamaki starts to weakly giggle, his brows rocket up his translucent forehead. 

“…Tamaki?”

“You’re…you’re never gonna stop surprising me,” He lifts his arms out in front of him, chest full of something warm and flushed face split with a grin. “Cuddle me,” 

A smile washes over Mirio’s brief concern and he quickly acquiesces, flopping down next to Tamaki and scooping him into his chest, even though both of them are covered, _covered,_ in cum. 

“You’re not hurt at all, right?” Mirio murmurs into his hair. 

“Nah. I told you, didn’t I? I’m really gay,” 

Mirio snorts. 

“Sure, but you got anyone bigger than a Sea Angel up on the surface?”

“Mm, none that are my type,” 

“Oh?” Mirio glances down. “What’s your type?”

“I couldn’t remember for a while—though I fell for you before I got my memories back, anyway,”

“…So your type is…?” 

Tamaki tilts his head to meet Mirio’s gaze.

“I’m saying my type is _you,_”

“So, tall, blond, see-through jocks?”

Tamaki snorts and gives half a shrug.

“With big weird cocks, sure,” 

“You like jock cocks,” Mirio snickers. 

“_You _have no room to poke fun, you begged to go down on a tentacle you knew would choke you out,” 

“I’m not poking fun! I’m just comfortable in my aesthetic,” He nuzzles into the top of Tamaki’s head. “So, you wanna come live with me or…?”

Tamaki feels a jolt pierce the haze of his mind, a new flush overtaking the cooling remnants of the old as he whips his gaze up to meet Mirio’s.

“Uh, well, I, um,”

“Oh. I mean,” It’s Mirio’s turn to blush. “…I was kidding, but…if you think you could swing it?” 

“I, uh,” Tamaki swallows. _“In your dorm?” _

“…Well, that’s why I was kidding, but,” He chews his lip, glancing to the side. “We don’t have another way to stay in touch, since signal can’t get down here. Yeah it’s fast or whatever, but, I’m serious about you. I’ve been serious this whole time, even at the start of all this, when there was a chance you’d never get your memories back. If there had been a way _then_, I still would have wanted this,” He gently squeezes Tamaki closer. “Having you here, now, finally knowing what this feels like…I don’t want to lose it, you know? I never wanted this to be a one-time thing…I just never got into the logistics of how we’d swing something more long-term because of the whole, you know, train dimension stuff,” 

“Mirio,” Tamaki murmurs, holding his gaze, which all at once tightens a little sadly. 

“Though…I never did ask if you wanted this to be long term or not, now that I think about it. I’m fine if you don’t…well, maybe not _fine, _but I’ll accept a ‘no,’ of course. But,” Mirio meaningfully pushes him gently back by the shoulders, bringing the fluttering heart inside him into Tamaki’s view. “…This is yours if you want it,” 

Tamaki feels his mouth trembling, eyes wide.

“I…I didn’t plan that far ahead either, but I…I owe you so much—”

“Don’t think like that,” Mirio gently interjects. “You don’t owe me anything you don’t want to give,” 

He glances down, gulping, inexorably drawn toward Mirio’s visible heart, and he softly presses his palm over it, hardly willing his hand to lift at all. 

“If it’s like that, then…since I know how this feels now, too, I don’t want to walk away from it, either,” 

Mirio cautiously brightens.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I don’t know about _moving in, _especially with, well, I don’t think Izuku would appreciate it,” 

“He’s actually way more chill than he comes off to be,” 

Tamaki smirks.

“Still…” Tamaki glances up, shyly. “Maybe…weekend visits?”

“Weekends would be incredible,” Mirio’s grin is luminous on his features. “I still need to visit the surface, too. Maybe I can watch one of those jizz fights you guys have,” 

Tamaki’s features quickly settle into an exasperated kind of resign. 

“Gonna keep that ball in the air, huh? Is the hazing starting so soon?”

“It’s in my nature. I _am _a college jock, so I must haze initiates,”

“Even if the initiate is me and the hazing is to start dating?”

“As far as the hazes I’ve participated in go, making cum jokes is the tamest one by a mile. But,” He leans in and presses a soft kiss to Tamaki’s lips. “…if completing the hazing is the start of us dating, then that’ll be the last jizz fight joke I’ll make. Promise,” 

“Deal,” 

Tamaki snorts and nuzzles into where Mirio’s heart is thrumming beneath his palm to continue cuddling, but quickly the stickiness between them gets to be too uncomfortable for Tamaki to stand. 

“So…what do showers look like in the Deepsea?”

“Showers?”

Tamaki glances up, trepidation creasing his brow.

“Like…you know, where you would go to wash jizz off your body?” Mirio’s mouth bunches to the side in thought and Tamaki sits up in horror, voice urgent. “How do you get clean down here? How does it work, Mirio?”

“I’m kidding!” His face splits open around a grin he’d apparently been holding in. “We have showers, they have water. No need to worry, you’ll be right at home!”

Tamaki exhales, exasperated but smirking despite himself around a warm bubble filling his chest. He glances down, and demurely he lets something romantic well up inside him and flow softly from his mouth.

“Well, making my way home was the goal from the start…and given some time, or some special people…home can be anywhere, right?”

“Even here?”

“If you’re here, then…especially here,”

Mirio’s smile is bright enough to replace Tamaki’s sun on the surface.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hedgie--I hope this is what you were craving! I love spending time with the boys in any AU and having an excuse to write something from yours as a birthday gift was no exception!


End file.
